


try again. fail again. fail better.

by babypapaya



Series: mongol rally travel log [1]
Category: Formula 1 RPF
Genre: Camping, Character Development, M/M, Midlife Crisis, Mongol Rally, OCs for Wordbuilding, Recovery, Road Trips, Sexual Content, Slow Burn, Travel, Unresolved Emotional Tension, smug bastard roadtrip buddies, the 10k mile roadtrip to end all roadtrips
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-28
Updated: 2021-01-11
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:48:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 34,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23886211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/babypapaya/pseuds/babypapaya
Summary: Two unemployed F1 drivers take a high-risk summer road trip from Prague to Ulaanbaatar.When Daniel retires and grid politics cost Valtteri his seat, the two ex-drivers walk away from their racing careers to chase down recovery via a summer-long road trip to Mongolia. After living over a decade as satellites to each other on the F1 grid, the breakdowns on the way—mechanical and emotional—pull back the curtains on a bond that Valtteri and Daniel have always had, despite years of efforts to hide it.
Relationships: Valtteri Bottas/Daniel Ricciardo
Series: mongol rally travel log [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2182947
Comments: 123
Kudos: 112





	1. no isn't an option, VB

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Restricted Work] by [singlemalter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/singlemalter/pseuds/singlemalter). Log in to view. 



> this is a work of fiction; please keep it off twitter, and away from the drivers.
> 
> retroactive edits: I started this in April 2020, before silly season 2020. all my driver market lore reflects that and doesn't take into account events such as Sebastian's departure from Ferrari nor its ripple effects. At chapter 7, the rating switched from M to E.

_“Something blooms in his chest at the sight of Daniel, faint pink marks across his back, hair fanned out across the pillow._

_“It’s not love, but something frighteningly close to codependency._

_“Beside him, Daniel stirs, turning so Valtteri’s looking at half-lidded eyes instead of messy curls. ‘Hey,’ he murmurs. ‘You’re here.’_

_“‘Why would I be somewhere else?” Valtteri says, and he thinks he can afford to stay a little longer.”_

\- “better to stop voluntarily than to be cut off,” singlemalter, 2020

* * *

“I can’t afford to stay long; I was supposed to fly back to the factory today.” Valtteri dries his hands on the kitchen towel and slips into a chair behind a short-stack of Daniel’s pancakes.

Across the kitchen table, Daniel grins. “The team waits for no one,” he says.

“Just because you aren’t driving doesn’t mean we have to be strangers.” Valtteri's voice doesn’t shake, but he pushes the sentence out like it’s rehearsed. Their feet bump awkwardly under the table and he jerks his away. 

He keeps his eye contact aggressively steady, watching Daniel through the dust motes dancing in a beam of morning sunlight splashed across the kitchen. The scattered hickeys marked on Daniel’s collarbone draw his eyes like they’re practically neon, not a deepening purple. The less he looks at them, the better he can ignore just how _easily_ he’d let himself give them. 

Daniel must notice his steady gaze. He casually tugs his shirt collar in a vain attempt to cover the evidence, swallows a too-big mouthful of blueberry pancakes, and asks, “You’re not going to tell me you miss me, _are_ you?”

Valtteri laughs, but the gesture is perfunctory. “Of course, that’s why I pretended to run into you last night.” 

“Any thoughts on a re-do?” Daniel sets down his fork, the corner of his mouth is already quirking into a smile.

“That was okay, I didn’t mean for it to happen but it was fun. It just—it was very fast.” Valtteri takes a sip of coffee—it’s surprisingly good—and smiles, something between rueful and cheeky. “Not _you._ It was just very impulsive. Unusual for me. Thank you for the pancakes.”

“You're welcome,” Daniel replies, his voice small. He mashes a blueberry between the tines of his fork, watches purple smear across the plate. He draws a messy heart with the stain. 

Valtteri has to say it. It feels rude, but better now than later. Might be awkward later. “I should focus on the racing this year, I'm not really looking for anything right now.”

Daniel looks up. “Of course, no strings attached to catching up on a night out,” he says, attempting a wink and a nudge, but a wink doesn’t convey the sentiment alone, and he can’t nudge someone across the table. He grins, but he just looks silly. Valtteri certainly feels silly.

There are a dozen things Valtteri wants to say, though the mood is dead and he keeps silent for the rest of the meal. He leaves a bit of food on his plate before announcing he _should really go now._

At the door, he clasps Daniel’s hand and Daniel looks as though he’s falling forward, but Valtteri breaks the grip after a firm shake. “I miss you in the paddock. Visit us this year.” 

It’s closer to a demand than an invite. Valtteri sweeps out the door, pulling it shut behind him. He hates to go so fast, but the air had been getting heavy. _Sorry, Dan._ Who the fuck leaves the morning after with a _handshake?_ (After kissing someone last night _like that?_ ) Valtteri Bottas guesses that he does. 

* * *

Tucked into his window seat that afternoon as the ground falls away from the plane, there’s only one thought on Valtteri’s mind:

Falling into bed with Daniel Ricciardo is not the best way to right a year that’s already going sideways. Christ.

* * *

Daniel doesn’t visit the paddock that year. Valtteri is sure that Daniel knows what’s going on, though, you don’t kill a decade of connections to one _home_ just by sitting in another. 

They text each other, Daniel sends him links to shitty memes, and they trade music recommendations they both know they won’t listen to. They call on the phone on the odd weekend, bump into each other on runs in Monaco, and they don’t talk about the shitshow that 2022 is turning into, they don’t talk paddock rumours. 

It’s easy to appreciate the oasis that Daniel’s friendship is; there’s one person who won’t pry for details about a career slipping down the drain.

One afternoon, as they part after an aimless chat, he catches the ghost of a look from Daniel and Valtteri’s jaw tightens. Daniel _knows_ his success is on tenterhooks; everyone knows _._ But Daniel doesn’t poke the bruise, Valtteri only shakes his head and gives his cheeky, rueful smile, and Daniel looks away. It’s probably hard to smile when he knows he’s watching a disaster. 

They don’t talk as paddock rumours become realities, and for a week Daniel’s texts go unreplied to as Valtteri is ferried from press conference to interview, and inelegantly asked _and how does that make you_ _feel? _ in so many ugly ways that he stops answering everyone. 

He doesn’t even read anyone’s texts the week after, and Daniel stops messaging. Maybe he’s forgotten about it. Maybe he’s just taken the hint and is being kind. 

He knows Daniel’s watching his purposefully vague, deliberately upbeat Instagram stories, posted from unnamed locations in Finland. Valtteri will surface when he feels like it, but the press need _something,_ or gossip will run entirely unchecked.

A race weekend comes and goes. Valtteri lives on his couch. His mum drops by, doesn’t say anything, but hands him the childhood quilt he left at home years ago. He wraps himself up and doesn’t look at his phone. The Instagram followers can wait. If they want to see his weakness, they can infer what they like from his silence.

* * *

Being retired is boring for Daniel. 

_Damn, I had plans?_

In retrospect he realises his privilege.

In retrospect he realises there are a million ways to lose in motorsports. 

He took one, Valtteri took another, and now all there is to do is stare in the rearview mirror at a sport made of shrines to those who kept winning. 

_He’s out because he had to go. You chose to quit._

Maybe being worried about VB was another quick hobby to outgrow, one more in the string of Shit Daniel Tries And Gives Up Because It’s Not Cars. A major L, as the rookies might say.

In the moment, he’s just bored. The roads around Monaco and Nice are too smooth, and for a soul-sucking moment Daniel feels ancient, world-weary and surfeited. What do you do when you’ve already done everything?

* * *

For some people, opportunity knocks. For others, opportunity barrels into their life at a breakneck pace and demands to be taken. 

Valtteri was planning to emerge from his sporadically-chronicled emotional safehouse on his own time—like a butterfly reborn from a cocoon, or a scolded puppy from a doghouse, or in any fashion in between. 

But when opportunity to share comes to Daniel, he seems to pitch it like a fastball before anyone can ask for details.

Daniel always seemed secretly hell-bent on making people into butterflies.

* * *

So Daniel calls him, and Valtteri winces at his phone for a minute and lets the call go to voicemail. Daniel calls again. This time Valtteri picks up.

“Yeah?” He stands on his deck barefoot, quilt draped over his shoulders. “It’s 4 in the morning.” He doesn’t mention that it’s already light outside, because it’s summer in Finland, and Valtteri has always had a casual relationship with light and dark. 

_“You’re going to say yes, okay? Tell me you’ll say yes.”_

“Depends… yes to what?”

_“I was going to start this by telling you I found a seat for you but I thought naw, that would be too cruel.”_

“Yes to _what?”_

_“So I’m going to start rallying, man. Gem of an opportunity. What d’you think?”_

A silence. “You’ve been retired five months, mate. Why’d you call?”

 _“So Michael told me about this.”_ Daniel draws out the moment as long as possible. _“I told him I was bored and he told me about his cousin who drove the Mongol Rally in her gap year. I googled it and signed up and you’re coming with me.”_ Deep breath. _“No isn’t an option, VB.”_

There’s smugness oozing through the phone line and Valtteri bites back a sigh. “What the fuck is the Mongol Rally?”

_“It’s… not a real rally, actually. How do you feel about a road trip from Prague to Ulaanbaatar?”_

Jesus. Fucking Daniel Ricciardo. “Mongolia? That’s like… fifteen thousand klicks?”

_“Depends on the route, you choose your own.”_

“I’ll assume it’s not official, because I’ve never heard of it before.”

_"Noooo… not exactly. It's about the journey, VB, fuck the destination. Life's too much about the destination, you know? No offence, but fuck goals. Bullshit. You drive on your own time in your own car and raise money for charity. You in?"_

"What do you _get_ for your sign-up money?" The concept is less than thrilling, but Valtteri's tentatively intrigued. 

_"The concept, you know? The camaraderie."_ Daniel drags out every last syllable of the word.

"That's not very thrifty. Still got that Renault cash in the bank?" Valtteri asks mildly.

 _"Low blow, man, low blow,"_ Dan snorts. _"The organisation actually arrange a few meetups along the way, make it easier to convoy with other teams. You also get some stickers for your car?"_ he adds helpfully.

"Amazing."

 _"We'll need sponsors. Our fundraiser goal is—"_ papers rustle on the other end of the line— _"a thousand pounds,"_ Daniel announces gravely. 

"Mm." Valtteri squints at the brightening sky. It sounds like a pure shitshow. It sounds like Daniel's life calling. Life's too much about the destination. "Big goal. I think I can help you scrounge that up."

 _“Damn, really? That was simple. Maybe I sold it too rosily. Wait till you see the car,"_ he says, amending his pitch. _"It’s going to be harder than you think. Mongolia, baby."_

“I don’t like anything easy in the world.” Dial tone. 

Mongolia, baby. 

He digs his phone out of his pocket again to text the recent caller. _let me know what route you want. we need visas._

* * *

The next month is a checklist of trip preparations. Car. Visas. Sponsors. Insurance. Someone to water the houseplants while they’re gone. 

Daniel already has a car lined up. “We can drive whatever we want,” he tells Valtteri, “as long as it’s an absolute shitbox. There are only three rules in this rally, and first is that the car has to be one mile short of a wreck and the engine in our drive has to be one litre or less.”

“Pardon?”

“One-point-two if you’re feeling vulnerable.”

Valtteri wishes he misheard. “Bring back the fucking V-12s,” he quotes dubiously. “Okay, one litre. Do you have a Panda in mind?”

“Not quite,” Daniel grins. “I’ve arranged us something better, but we have to pick him up in Switzerland.”

* * *

They meet up in Switzerland at the Raikkonen family place.

Valtteri’s been silent at home for so long, it’s a relief to run his mouth at someone else, even if _someone else_ is Kimi Raikkonen. “Dan called me and said he going to start rallying. I don’t even know why I picked up.” 

“Because I had found a seat for you!” Daniel insists, in mock indignance.

Kimi listens on, faintly grinning. “A seat in this thing?” He jerks his chin at the tiny car, wedged in the back of the garage. It’s a foreboding matte black draped in a thick layer of dust. It’s older than Valtteri. It’s probably even older than Kimi. But maybe not, considering it _was_ Kimi’s first car.

It’s a Lada.

“Full disclosure, I _did_ say it was the worst seat you’d ever have in your life.” Daniel mockingly raises both his palms and shrugs. 

Valtteri crosses his arms tighter. “When you start at rock bottom it can’t get worse.” He smiles with half his mouth, feeling silly.

“This baby was rock solid for me.” Kimi slaps the roof of the car. “I hear that’s not what you’re looking for, though.”

Daniel’s grinning. “Sorry, man, we need to make it worse before it gets better. No pain, no gain. With your blessing, we’re ripping out the engine. Throwing in something smaller, slapping on a paint job, some roof racks.”

“You need a sump guard?” An underbody shield would be necessary to protect the car from rocks on unpaved, mountainous roads. 

Valtteri cocks his head and regards the car for a moment. “Yes, but not yet. We’ll get one locally in Turkey.”

“At least before the Pamir Highway,” Daniel adds. “Weight-saving measures as far as possible. We’re slumming it, man. Cash for cheap gas all the way.”

The corner of Kimi’s mouth twitches, and Valtteri can read him loud and clear. _Idiot kids having a midlife crisis._ He looks down to hide his own smile.

“It was given to me and I made it better, so I’m giving it to you and you’re free to make it worse. Stay as long as you need to fix it up.”

He’s so nonchalant that Valtteri has to ask. “You’re sure? You'll honestly not be getting it back.”

Kimi shrugs. “It’s yours. The circle of life. Take it home to Russia for me.” 

Daniel claps him on the back. He’s nearly vibrating. “I knew I could come to you, man. Thanks. We’ll put a sticker on him for you.”

Valtteri doesn’t know what to say, but nods anyway. It’s far from the first time he’s been given a car, but this one will probably never sit in his garage between the AMG GT and his F40. 

They push the Lada outside into the sunlight, and he spends the day with grease up to his elbows and Daniel at his shoulder.

* * *

With the car sorted, the rest is paperwork. Valtteri and Daniel spend weeks texting map sketches back and forth, assembling a route that treads the thin line of _bureaucratically possible, sufficiently weird,_ and _deliberately inconvenient._

 _“Planned grit, man. Character growth through difficulty,”_ Daniel rattles off over the phone one day, and Valtteri knows he’s been talking to Michael again.

“You know, in Finland we have just one word for that and more.”

_“What is it?”_

“I think you should ask Nico.”

Valtteri knew it was easy to travel as an F1 driver, but the amount of paperwork and random googling it takes for adventure travel is still staggering. Plans form, change, get revised, stops get added, visas get denied.

“We have to eighty-six Armenia,” Daniel announces, “since we’ve both been to Baku recently.” He tosses his passport across his living room to Valtteri, who’s sitting on the floor in a paper sea of Federal Requirements from nearly every nation and disputed territory in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

Valtteri snatches the passport, thick with stickers and well-stamped, and thumbs through it. His looks much the same. “Oh. Okay. Georgia’s okay though?”

“Georgia’s a go, no problems with Azerbaijan again.”

“Well done Baku.”

Since their citizenships are different, travel entry requirements aren’t always the same. 

“You need a visa before you can enter Mongolia,” Valtteri notes.

“You don’t?”

“Just on entry. And you need one in Turkey. But we both need them for Russia, obviously.” Valtteri flips a few pages. “And Turkmenistan.”

“Shit, okay. I saw a lot of eVisas on the list, so maybe we can get them sorted ASAP.”

“I’ll get someone to make a list of the documents we need and make copies to send, as long as the embassies don’t need originals.”

“I’m pretty sure it’s cheating to get your _concierge_ to file your visa apps, VB,” Daniel declares, his tone all bite but his grin everlasting. 

Valtteri smiles faintly, still skim reading. “It’s the last time I’ll be using their services for two months. After this the only one at my beck and call is _you.”_

* * *

A semblance of a route gets cobbled together, and Valtteri sinks into an easy comfort alongside Daniel. _Good luck that we were never teammates,_ he realises absentmindedly. _Would have spoiled any chance of this._ For a week he sleeps on Daniel’s sofa in the Monaco flat, surrounded by trip plans. 

It’s comfortably domestic, they only work out when they feel like it, and Valtteri finds himself taking over the cooking. He stays in a lot. He’d never been worried about being recognised in Monaco before, because it never had consequences. Now that he’s lost what made him worth recognising, he’s suddenly interesting again. It’s a cruel joke, and the less he goes out, the less he has to think about it. He stays out of Daniel’s bedroom, too.

They stay up late one night with pizza while Daniel harasses Fernando Alonso on the phone, goading him for a KIMOA sponsorship of £200 for the trip. Fernando cedes, swayed more by the promise of advertisement space on the Lada than the charitable aspect, and throws in six pairs of sunglasses worth more than the “sponsorship.”

They try them all on when they arrive in the mail. 

“Never free of repping the brand, man,” Daniel muses, side by side with Valtteri as they survey themselves in the bathroom mirror.

“Nice to have a change of sponsorship, though.” 

Daniel has three pairs stacked in his hair, and takes off a blue-tinted pair to slot them on Valtteri’s face. “As long as it’s not Ray-Bans?”

“I’ve been wearing Police for the last three years.”

“And you know,” Daniel says offhandedly, “fuck the Police.”

Valtteri stares at Daniel in the blue-tint mirror for a moment. He nods. “Fuck the Police." 

He has to leave the room before Daniel sees him laughing.

* * *

Soon it’s time to get the Lada in the wrap shop, once all the sponsors are locked down. Despite Fernando’s reluctance, generous donations from Blue Coast Brewing have put them well over the bar of £1000. 

“I think _sponsoring yourself_ is cheating,” Valtteri points out.

Daniel gives him a thin-lipped smile. _"I_ didn't sponsor me, Jenson Button did.” He nods briskly.

“Of course. Thank _you,_ Jenson.” He riffles through some more papers. “Good thing we’re not driving through Iran, I guess, with a car wrapped in beer ads.”

“You’ve got the design finalised?”

“Yup. Blue and yellow, Mongol Rally logo and KIMOA on the doors, Blue Coast on the hood. Red Bull sticker on the bumper.”

Daniel claps Valtteri on the shoulder and leans over to peek at the sketches. “Come through, Christian Horner!”

“What did we even _get_ for that?”

“A hundred and fifty quid, a 24-pack of Red Bull, and Horner’s secrecy.”

Valtteri shrugs, but Daniel doesn’t move his hand. “Not bad. I talked to Abloy and they had a laugh and gave us five hundred with no more questions, so they’re also going on the bumper.”

“Five hundred?” Daniel whistles. “That’s a lot for a car that doesn’t even _have_ locks.”

“Let’s just get the car to the shop.”

The Lada looks out of place in the Monaco car park, but runs fine so far— 

“Kimi’s magic touch,” Daniel attributes generously—

—and Valtteri keeps his sweater hood up on the way to the auto detailer. Their car gets a raised eyebrow and the plans get a nod from the consultant in the sterile little showroom. 

“Don’t you need a number for your race car?” she asks, handing them samples of vinyl for colour selection, gracefully not following up on the spark of recognition Valtteri spotted in her eyes. “Rear panel, both sides.”

Valtteri and Daniel look at each other. Amidst all the planning, they’d decided to keep their names off the car, and Valtteri had totally forgotten a number.

“Ah—” he starts.

“—how about—” Daniel interrupts.

Valtteri nods at him. 

“80. We’ll take 80,” Daniel decides.

She nods and takes the samples back, noting the flagged ones. Valtteri pulls Daniel aside. “I was going to choose number three,” he whispers. “I thought you’d choose three.”

Daniel just shrugs. “It’s our car. Our numbers.”

Wordlessly, Valtteri bumps Daniel’s shoulder and nods. 

“We haven’t done a vintage Lada before, but that’s not a problem,” the consultant comments, handing them the quote. “Can you pick her up in three days?”

Daniel reaches for the sheet, but Valtteri grabs it first. “I’ve got it. Three days is perfect, thank you.”

They head out, this time both slipping into Daniel’s Porsche. 

“Is our car a girl?” he demands, once they’ve started driving.

Daniel hums. “Is it a boy?”

“I don’t think it matters, I never treated my cars like that.”

“Well, we have to at least name it, we can’t just call it _the Lada_ for two months—”

“If you give it a shit name like Sebas—”

 _“What_ was wrong with Seb’s car names?” Daniel demands, indignant.

Valtteri looks out his window. “They’re really awful.”

“Then I guess I’ll never tell you what I name my cars.”

“Thank you. _I’m_ naming the Lada.”

“Just make sure I can pronounce it, and we’re peachy.”

A snort. “No problem. If you have a problem with Finnish names being mispronounced, consider I do as well.”

Daniel laughs. “Point to VB. Any thoughts?”

Valtteri is silent for several minutes, and Daniel doesn’t probe. 

“Kämänen. Arto Kämänen? Yeah.”

“Arto Kämänen, huh.” Daniel tries out the name and nearly giggles. “Am I butchering that?”

Valtteri is generous with his evaluation. “Obviously.”

“What’s that mean? 

“Piece of shit,” Valtteri grins. _“Rikki_ means broken, and Arto is a name.”

“That’s insanely flattering,” Daniel says, glancing at his passenger. “You named it for me?”

“And Kämänen just means shitty, so it’s perfect.”

Daniel nods approvingly. “Kimi’s going to absolutely love that, you know.”

“He really is.”

“Well then.” Daniel rolls his shoulders back and they pull onto the lazy coastal highway that will take them back to Monaco from Nice. Valtteri’s still hiding in his hoodie, but Daniel’s already glowing in his summer tan and a pair of garish shorts, one hand draped over the steering wheel. Valtteri watches him for a minute, finds the spectacle vaguely unbearable, and looks away. Daniel grins as bright as the glare coming off the road. “We’re all set for Mongolia, then. You, me, and our broken piece of shit Lada Arto Kämänen.” He shakes his head. “Where did we go wrong?”

Valtteri would pay a lot to know, but that knowledge has to come on its own time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [VB’s TRAVEL LOG]  
> \- suprised Dan doesn’t know sisu. his finnish wildly nonexistnt  
> \- visas all ok. start line in 1 wk  
> \- pack camera bag + film
> 
> ~~~
> 
> many thanks to MasterEyebrow for the Finnish help and pun recommendations, and to singlemalter for starting Daniel/Valtteri, and lending me his fic concept as a foundation.  
> thanks for reading! comments are always open if you want to chat, and kudos are always appreciated <3


	2. rowdy guy with the cute aussie accent

[DR3 + VB77’s Mongol Rally ‘22 album]

[there's a photo pasted in of daniel at the prague campsite. it’s a low angle shot, taken with flash, with the night sky in the background. he’s sitting on arto kämänen’s roof rack, raising a beer and a peace sign.]

* * *

With only a week left until the rally starts, Valtteri has to fly back to Finland, pack, and join Daniel and Arto Kämänen at the starting line’s secret location somewhere near Prague. They’ll be given details as late as possible. In Mongol Rally culture, using a GPS is cheating, so Valtteri clings to his well-penciled maps.

“It’s a little like Burning Man,” Daniel had explained. “Except instead of camping in a desert with a group of unshowered anarchist LARPers on ket, you’re driving to Mongolia with a bunch of broke gearheads who would be hippies if they didn’t like cars so much.”

“Where’s the overlap?”

“No rules, do whatever the fuck you like on your own schedule. _Love thy neighbour as thyself_ type shit. Modern society is too safe and a risk to us all, at the same time. Also, probably still unshowered.” 

It’ll take Daniel two days to drive Arto across Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and into the Czech Republic. They’ve penciled in three days, in case of a breakdown on their first leg of the coming 17,000 kilometres. Besides, Daniel will be alone. Any emergency might take him extra time, which isn't theirs to waste until they take off from the starting line. 

* * *

Valtteri tries to pack light, but it’s not exactly a weekend trip. Temperatures will be frigid in Mongolia, while the Balkans are in heatwave season. He unearths the oldest duffle bag he can find, a relic from his year in the military, and shoves stacks of clothes into it. He stuffs socks in all the cracks, adds a few pairs of his most comfortable sneakers and his most well-worn boots. 

He wants to wince at every sponsor logo he sees, and it’s an ordeal—there are a lot. _When did Puma become my personal stylist?_ He packs the Puma gear anyway, it’s ubiquitous enough, but passes on Tommy Hilfiger. There’s not one single cap in his house that’s not motorsport-branded, so he texts Daniel to pick one up for him.

A technical jacket, power bank for his phone, and a battered hiking backpack full of sundries and paperwork round out the prep. When he’s done, there’s only one collared shirt in the whole lot, and that fact feels more remarkable than it should be. 

His bags by the door look smaller than he thought they would be. _One last walk around the house,_ he decides. And he’d almost missed it—a card from his mum on the couch, tucked in an envelope on top of his neatly-folded childhood quilt. 

He’s pretty sure it was on the floor last time he left.

 _Open when needed,_ the envelope says. He tucks it into his pocket and almost turns to go, but his hand hovers over the quilt momentarily. It’s soft with wear, but clean, and it smells like the same laundry detergent as it did when he was five. Valtteri picks it up and traces a thumb over the binding seam. It’ll definitely get stained if he brings it. _What the hell. Things are supposed to be changing._ He tucks it under his arm and shoulders his bags. 

* * *

He spends the flight to Prague wanting to fidget. He tries to blame it on the economy class seating, compared to his usual business or better—because if Daniel has to rough it in the Lada, Valtteri can too—but it's more than that. 

_Planned grit._ He smiles wryly to himself. It's well enough to change a tire in pouring rain at night, but sometimes suffering comes in the decidedly less romantic form of flat Sprite served to seat 27B in a budget airline narrowbody. 

_It's Daniel._ The thought clarifies instantly, as soon as Valtteri puts down his phone. They haven't _talked._ He's spent the last month hanging up on calls or leaving the room as soon as Daniel starts clearing his throat and looking nervous. _Well sure, we've talked._ About trip plans, not about the art of fucking once and then pretending it didn't happen, nor about what it's like to have your team fold underneath your feet, nor what it's like to back away from your life’s work having failed what seems to be the single objective. 

_Well, it's because I have nothing I want to say._ Or— _I don’t know how to say what I need to say._ He doesn’t even want to think the words: _and it’s killing me._

He hates to admit it, but avoidant as he is, Daniel’s been his most stable point during the fallout of Mercedes’ collapse. It’s just unfortunate Daniel’s also the textbook definition of a loose cannon. Burying himself in paperwork and obsessive planning for an uncertain and _deliberately problematic_ endeavour has, gratefully, kept Valtteri’s mind off the shock unraveling of what was essentially his home. But on the plane, the reality of the next six weeks is starting to creep in.

Daniel will be omnipresent. _Thinking_ will be utterly unavoidable.

Valtteri has an unhelpful, intrusive remembrance of body-warm sheets, teeth against his neck, and tracing fingertips against the linework tattoo of an astronaut. He squeezes his eyes shut. _Does Dan think about that, too?_ He hopes not. _Maybe he does._ It burns, somewhere deep inside, with an embarrassing, juvenile brand of awkwardness. 

He can’t think about this. He’s got bigger things to worry about. Things like _what the fuck to do next year,_ like _if George is having any better luck after being booted from the other Merc seat,_ and like _if Daniel remembered to pack camping chairs._

Valtteri forces himself to take another sip of the lifeless Sprite and keep his itching fingers off his phone. No time like the present to wean himself off that thing, he reflects. Toto would be proud. _That is, if Toto even gives a shit._

But Valtteri gives a shit, and spends the rest of the short flight staring up at the overhead luggage bins, and subtly making faces at the 2-year-old in seat 26C who keeps reaching back through the seat gaps. She narrows her eyes at him, and he squints back.

In Prague, he gathers his bags and manages to get a taxi to the hostel Daniel’s booked for the night. It’s a strange relief to see Arto again, and surprisingly easy to forget his airplane thoughts about Daniel. Tonight they’ll check over the car and their supplies one last time, and tomorrow they head to the rally kickoff. From there, they’ll informally induct themselves into the ranks of the rally hopefuls—for not everyone who begins in Prague crosses the finish line—and then camp overnight and set off the next day.

Arto Kämänen looks good, too. They’re a blue-and-yellow eyesore from a mile away, a thin layer of garish vinyl covers a multitude of sins. There’s a flat tray-like device made of light steel grating attached to the roof racks, with a jumble of empty gas-cans, waterproofed bags, and what appear to be spare parts strapped on. It looks a trifle under-loaded, _but better to drive light than start heavy,_ Valtteri thinks. 

“How was the car?” he asks, dragging bags from the trunk to jam his own alongside Daniel’s strangely bulky luggage. _He got the camping chairs. Thank god._ Crucially, there’s also a tow rope and duct tape.

Daniel leans against the driver door and slaps the roof. “Arto-D2 loves it. Couldn’t be better.”

Valtteri extracts himself from the roof rack tethers to stare dead-eyed at Daniel. “Okay,” he says finally. “What’s the food situation?”

“Surprisingly decent!” Daniel reaches into the backseat and taps a large tote box. “Camping stove. Kerosene and pans. Dried fruit for you, CLIF bars for me, some instant oats. The Red Bull from Horner, and some empty water jugs for Central Asia and such. Champagne for our podium finish. Beer. Probably too much beer. Michael gave me loads of multivitamins and said we should both take them. The rest of it is all shitty snacks and things we might not find later while having mental breakdowns.” He smiles, so clearly thrilled. “I’m not gonna be able to sleep tonight, man.”

Valtteri leans into the backseat and snaps the tote open, peeking in to see stacks of instant ramen and canned meat. “Really appetising stuff, mate.”

“And most importantly, there’s a first-aid kit somewhere in there, so feel free to get diarrhea whenever you want.” Daniel gestures vaguely into the backseat.

“You know. The worst thing about only two people on our team means that you can’t blame your farts on anyone else.”

“Mm.” Daniel looks pensive. “That’s sort of an L.”

“Maybe when we convoy up with some other teams?”

Daniel raises his eyebrows, and the grin is back. _“Obviously.”_

* * *

"You think anyone's going to recognise us here?" Daniel asks, pulling onto a gravel laneway. Apparently it's supposed to lead to the secret location, but other than spotting a few other tricked-out clunkers crawling the roads, there's no sign yet of the rally organisers.

"They better not," Valtteri mutters. "But they will. British car people, you know." He rattles the paper map loudly, though their location isn't even on a marked road. 

"Jeez. You reckon we can go undercover all night?"

Valtteri snorts. "We _can,_ but we _won't._ You're going to have three beers and start talking. And everyone will wonder who the rowdy guy with the cute Aussie accent is." He pauses. "No way he's the same rowdy Aussie F1 driver who dramatically retired last year, no."

"Aww, you think my accent's cute?"

Valtteri turns to look at his driver. "No," he deadpans.

The road takes a sharp turn and opens up. “Oh, _shit.”_ Daniel surveys the grassy field in front of them as the Lada slowly takes the bumps in the trail.

 _That’s a lot of cars._ “We’re going to blend right in,” Valtteri notes. They all look hideous, and many already wear dust on their sponsor stickers.

Daniel ends up wedging the Lada between two ever-ubiquitous Fiat Pandas, and Valtteri tosses camping gear out the back to claim their campsite. Daniel hands him the promised unbranded cap—though the tag inside does say Melin—and he keeps it pulled low. 

“I feel like a wanted man,” he tells Daniel quietly, as they assemble their tent.

Daniel smirks, and pokes him in the ribs from three metres away with a tentpole. “Only slightly more wanted than me, hopefully.”

Valtteri jerks away and swats the pole. “Stop!”

“Ticklish, VB?” Daniel’s eyebrows shoot up.

“No comment.” A moment later he speaks again. “We need to meet people if we want to convoy with anyone later,” he points out.

“Then let’s just hope we don’t run into any travel vloggers,” Daniel says. “Hopefully everyone’s granola is crunchy enough that they don’t have the ‘gram.”

Valtteri laughs. He hasn’t posted an instagram story for at least a week, and is trying not to think about whatever news may be concocted about him by now. He can already visualise tabloid fodder headlines if anyone narcs on him— _Angry, Unhinged Bottas Flees Continent in Stolen Car_ —but everyone who matters already knows. _So that’s what counts._

The opening ceremonies turn out to be quite gauche—mud wrestling and bonfires and all, very much Daniel’s element rather than his own—but, Valtteri suddenly reflects, he’s fresh out of a sport whose spectacle is no less grandiose, just more palatable when plastered with luxury ads and cars with parts that cost more than any vehicle on this field. 

Maybe they’d all feel better if they started F1 race weekends sharing beers around campfires, after a tug-of-war match divided by engine manufacturer and handing out prizes for ugliest car at the circuit. 

Valtteri’s perched on a rough log bench, shoulder to shoulder with a crowd around a bonfire, gripping an unfamiliar beer that someone had generously shoved at him. The sky’s darkened, and the fire is sending sparks up to join the stars. A lot of sparks, he notes absently. _Lots of resin. Might be pine._ Across the fire, Daniel’s also waving a drink around, talking very gesturally—and very loudly—to a group of college kids wearing matching bandanas. 

Idiotic of him, Valtteri thinks fondly. He takes a drink. The can is sweating in his hand, but it isn’t even that shit. 

The person beside him shifts and bumps his shoulder. 

“Oops! Sorry,” the perp announces. Valtteri looks up and hides an instinctive grimace. _There's the instagram type if he ever saw one._

“No worries,” he says quickly, glancing down again. 

“None at all.” 

Gratefully, she doesn’t try to talk, so Valtteri surprises himself by replying a minute later. “Quiet night,” he offers in a muted voice, and it’s blatantly sarcastic. At another campfire, someone screams. The chatter is incessant. The college kids have produced a guitar, and Daniel’s trying to get his hands on it. 

“Just the peace and quiet I expected,” she nods. 

Despite himself, Valtteri faintly smiles. “First time doing the rally?”

“Yeah, it’s been on the bucket list for years, though. You?”

“Uh… first time doing this one, yeah,” he agrees. “Kind of a surprise for me though. My—one of my coworkers invited me.”

She looks the same age as the average rally entrant: around thirty. The night is cooling fast, but the hood on her sweater is falling back to show buzzed blonde hair and a tattoo behind one ear. 

“Well then you’ve really got the spirit, then! If it’s the first time for this one, where else’ve you been?”

He twists his fingers around each other and presses a small dent into the can. His obsessive pre-planning had absolutely not been the spirit. Furthermore, it’s time to think about lying.

“I was recently in Finland,” he says honestly. “And you?”

She nods. “Patagonia, two months ago. Iceland before that. My partner and I, we're travel bloggers.”

_Shit._

“That’s nice.” He can’t hide his own laugh, but it’s hapless rather than amused. “Where’s the camera, then?” Valtteri nods at her empty hands.

“Oh, my partner’s got it.” She points at someone two benches over. “She’s the one with—yeah, with the camera.” She snorts. “Brilliant of me. Who’s on your team?”

“Ah—just me and my friend.” Valtteri nods across the fire. “The shitty singer with the guitar. It was his idea, but I’ll probably be the one hauling his ass all the way.”

“Teamwork makes the dream work,” she quotes idly, and squints in the firelight. “He looks familiar.” 

“Really?” It’s horrible, how Daniel draws every eye. Even with a cap on, and tucked into a large sweater, he’s still a _presence_ in the space, tangibly warm and glowing, and Valtteri’s skin prickles whenever he hears Daniel laugh. Which is terribly often. _It’s inconvenient as hell._

“Probably just me,” she shrugs.

“He’s a very regular guy,” Valtteri offers, once again honestly. 

He changes the topic to ask about her car and the team’s route plans, finds out she—Elli—and her girlfriend—Clara—also plan on driving through Turkmenistan, and casually manages to get her WhatsApp info for potential convoy plans, all without offering his name. He’s so occupied with guarding his words that he doesn’t notice Daniel come up until he feels a tap on his shoulder, then he excuses himself as Daniel slings an arm around his shoulders. 

“Having a good time?” Daniel asks muzzily, rubbing his eyes in the darkness as he steers them back to Arto Kämänen.

“Thinking of getting a wig and a new identity,” he replies, carefully picking his footsteps over the uneven field.

“That bad, huh?”

“The woman beside me was a travel vlogger.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah. I saved you from recognition, actually. She was nice, though.”

“You looked kind of uncomfortable there, I thought you might be getting tired.”

Valtteri steps out of Daniel’s grasp and the arm slips off his shoulders. “We don’t have to sleep yet. I just didn’t want to sit there much longer.” 

“That’s okay, VB.” Daniel yawns. “It was a good time to back out.”

They reach the car but don’t open it up, content to sit in the day-warm grass against the rear bumper. Daniel still presses close, and he smells like campfire smoke. 

Valtteri shifts, but doesn’t move away from Daniel’s shoulder. “You don’t have to look out for me, right? I’m a grown up.” He forces a faint laugh. 

Daniel counts on his fingers. “I’m almost two whole months older than you.”

“You don’t have to.”

“No, I don’t,” Daniel replies steadily. “But I want to, so I’m going to, and we won’t make it if you don’t let me.”

Valtteri stiffens. “Won’t make what?”

“Make it to Ulaanbaatar, dummy. What did you think?”

“Nothing,” he says quickly. He shrugs, and relaxes. “You’re pensive tonight.”

Daniel drains the dregs from the can in his hand, and Valtteri watches his throat as he tips his head back and swallows. Dan’s neck is still _thick,_ he realises. Like he’s still working out to drive. Valtteri unconsciously rubs his own. Daniel crunches the can in one hand but doesn’t toss it away. The moonlight catches on the aluminum and sparkles dully as he turns it in his hands. 

“I dunno, VB, feels silly to imagine this is going to be life-changing or anything like that. But like, lowkey I kind of want it to be.”

“Feels like the whole year is supposed to be life-changing for you.”

“It’s not, though.” Daniel taps fingernails against the can. “It’s just boring. I feel selfish, though.”

Valtteri doesn’t reply, just stretches his legs into the grass and watches Daniel fidget. “Why?” he asks, moments later.

“You know—what it’s like to not get what you want, and then be like ‘what’s next?’” Daniel doesn’t elaborate.

Valtteri just nods. “You know.”

“Glad you’re coming with, man.”

“Yeah?”

Daniel turns his head to look at Valtteri. Valtteri won’t meet the gaze.

“I have the feeling you need it.”

* * *

“Hey, VB.” Daniel taps his air mattress. “Are you asleep?” he whispers. They’re zipped into their tent, the last flashlight clicked off ten minutes ago. 

“Yeah,” Valtteri mutters into his pillow. 

The faster he falls asleep, the less he has to think about Dan being _right there._

“Okay.” Daniel turns over, the mattress squeaking. “Wait—”

“Shhhhh.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [VB’s TRAVEL LOG]  
> \- google elly’s blog westward hoes (???)  
> \- dan doesnt snore. lucky for me  
> \- don’t let him get drunk. he’ll probly get sad  
> \- left my good watches at home. wearing a casio. feels like sheding a skin. feels weird


	3. the pitiful of motorsport

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you can find me @ totovolff on the tunglr site 👊😔
> 
> thanks to everyone reading this rarepair! I have been Not Good at replying to comments but they're so very appreciated and I love to know you're following.

[DR3 + VB77’s Mongol Rally ‘22 album]

[there’s a parking ticket tucked into this page, and a candy bar wrapper glued in. below it is a photo of daniel and valtteri’s signatures in sharpie marker on the hood of arto kämänen. opposite is a photo of valtteri crouching over a camp stove and heating soup. the photo is blurry and slightly too dark.]

* * *

Valtteri wakes up to the swish of nylon in his face, opening his eyes to see the tent collapsing around him. Squinting in the brightness, he turns over. Daniel’s bed has disappeared.

“Rise and shine, sleepin’ beauty,” Daniel calls from outside, collapsing the pole he’s extracted from the tent. 

Valtteri groans. “Wait ‘til I’m awake to take down the tent. Asshole.” Fighting off layers of blue nylon, he rubs his eyes before shoving his pillow and air mattress out the tent flap. He follows shortly, detangling himself from his trailing sleeping bag. 

Daniel wrenches the other tent pole free with a snap, and the structure collapses entirely. “Didn’t want to wake you up any sooner than necessary, man. Jeez, put a shirt on. Aren’t you cold?”

Valtteri doesn’t even deign to look in Daniel’s direction,  _ weak, solar powered Australian,  _ and drags his duffel from Arto to pull on a hoodie. 

“It’s oh-eight-hundred and we hit the road in two hours,” Daniel says, as Valtteri crouches in the car and performs a cursory tooth-brushing with his toiletry kit and the dregs of a water bottle. He spits in the grass and climbs out of the car to watch Daniel stuff the tent back into its storage bag.

“Big day ahead. I’ll make breakfast.” 

The sun is glaringly bright, and Valtteri’s glad for the excuse to hide behind sunglasses. It feels blessedly familiar, and after eating he’s comfortable enough to wander the field with Daniel. 

He squints at one dilapidated car for a second as they pass. “That one’s not making it to Mongolia,” he mutters to Daniel. 

Daniel’s staring is less subtle. “Probably not even to Istanbul,” he says. He nods at another entrant. “Did you see the guys who signed up with bikes? Their engine limit is 125ccs. Yikes.”

Valtteri raises his eyebrows. “They must have bigger balls than you.”

_ “Orrrr _ maybe my balls are so big I’d crush them if I had to spend even two  _ weeks _ on a bike,” Daniel grins, bumping Valtteri with his shoulder.

“I really don’t want to verify that.”

“You alrea—”

“No.”

“Okay,  _ fine.” _

Thirty seconds later, Daniel apologises, and Valtteri knows why Daniel’s not doing the rally on a motorbike.  _ He’d die if he didn’t have anyone to talk at for weeks straight. For some reason, he thinks I want to listen to him. _ Another minute later, Valtteri realises,  _ Daniel definitely hasn’t thought about that. _

_ On the other hand, if anyone could do the rally on a bike, it would be Dan. _ Generously foisting himself upon the hospitality of every local who spoke to him, no doubt, and they’d both come away better for the experience. Valtteri winces. He can’t relate. He doesn’t really want to.

The next two hours are a whirlwind of final checks, ratchet straps, lending tools to other entrants, and surreptitiously signing a few cars when their observant drivers approach bearing hopeful faces and a Sharpie marker. 

Daniel’s passing out hugs like there’s no tomorrow, while the look in Valtteri’s eye would bind anyone to silence. He discreetly asks to borrow the marker for a second and hauls Daniel back toward Arto Kämänen. Leaning over the bumper of the sturdy little Lada, he scraws his signature on the hood and holds out the Sharpie. 

“Looks like you’ve had your car signed by a Formula One driver, huh,” he says casually. 

Daniel snatches the marker and scribbles his signature beside Valtteri’s, beaming brighter than the glare of the morning sun on the shiny vinyl wrap job. “Looks like  _ you’ve _ had your car signed by a Formula One driver.”

“Too bad we don’t have our car signed by any Formula One world champions,” Valtteri replies, not breaking eye contact. He takes the marker back.

“Pinnacle of motorsport indeed,” Daniel says, and wrinkles his nose. “More like the pitiful of motorsport, man.”

“Oh?” Valtteri uncaps the marker and regards the car with a nearly vengeful look. He leans over again and writes  _ THE PITIFUL OF MOTORSPORT _ in tidy block letters underneath their names. He caps the marker one last time. “We did need a team name, and this one’s good. Take the marker back, okay? I’ll clean up the campsite.”

Daniel jogs off and Valtteri doesn’t move. 

It eats away at him that he never won a championship, obviously. This year was supposed to be his chance, with Lewis freshly retired and George finding his legs in his first year with Mercedes. 2022 had hit F1 with a devastating driver shuffle, with Daniel, Lewis and Sebastian all retiring in 2021. Haas had collapsed completely, taking Romain down with them, and Kevin returned to Renault to replace Daniel. Antonio had been promoted from Alfa Romeo to partner Charles, making Ferrari surprisingly cohesive and more of a threat than ever. Even so, Valtteri knew his chances were better than before.

The year shit the bed when Petronas pulled out of motorsport sponsorship, having recovered poorly from the 2020 global recession. The next domino to fall was Daimler yanking Mercedes out of F1 to focus solely on Formula E, after having toyed with the idea for a few years. Toto hadn’t even fought back, just slipped neatly into a role with Aston Martin—the newest iteration in Force India’s turbulent timeline—and confirmed what everyone already suspected.  _ He wasn’t invested in anyone but Lewis. The only person who wanted me to win was myself.  _

_ Wants me to win, _ he corrected himself. 2023 is another year. 2023 could— 

“Hey.” Daniel reappears.

The blessedly championship-free Daniel Ricciardo.  _ It’s hard enough to look at him sometimes, glowing golden god, beloved Australian of the people. _

Sometimes when Valtteri sees him, he still only sees the mop-haired young adult with crooked teeth and one unfortunate ear piercing. Though Daniel’s adoring fans watch a perfectly-imperfect, deliberately casual, suavely clumsy crowdpleaser, to Valtteri, the tattooed and polished Daniel of the 2020s is like a light projection of adulthood onto the boy he’d fought with for almost half his life.

Daniel would be just as gracious but utterly insufferable with a championship. It would eat Valtteri alive. Even more than he’s eaten alive by Daniel’s sheer presence. His existence alone all pomp and circumstance. 

Now they’re both  _ the pitiful of motorsport, _ sitting in a field outside Prague, on their way to Asia, trying to infuse some meaning into their lives where F1 had failed to do so. 

_ There’s no meaning to it unless you win. _

It’s kind of tragically right that Daniel never won.  _ Either we both do, or we both don’t. Like… smoking, or garlic. He can’t get ahead of me. _

The universe wouldn’t allow that. 

Valtteri looks up, and smiles.

* * *

They roll over the starting line leaning on the horn, adding to the general clamour. Daniel perched on the roof rack again, draped in an Australian flag. Valtteri’s scheduled to drive the first leg of the trip, the rough tracing on his maps trailing south, into Austria. Today’s “rally stage” is in familiar territory. Daniel jumps into the passenger seat a minute later and Valtteri steps on the gas—as heavily as an ancient little Lada will let him. 

The concept of the drive may be romantic,  _ but god damn, the seats are uncomfortable. _ Maybe it’s just the night already spent on dodgy mattresses, but Valtteri would like some lumbar support. “Arto Kämänen’s really living up to their name,” he comments.

The first few hours are excruciating, as they stick to the right lane of regional highways, not wanting to push the car too much on the first day. An impromptu convoy of Mongol Rally cars surround them, but they gradually thin out as teams filter onto different routes. 

Around noon, Daniel produces a stack of plastic-wrapped sandwiches from the food tote and passes bite-sized pieces to Valtteri, ignoring repeated complaints to  _ just hand me the whole thing please, I can drive with one hand. _

Valtteri hasn’t driven this slowly in  _ years. _

“We’ll get used to it, though. It’s about the journey, not the destination,” Daniel chants. He keeps his window open and drags his dancing fingers through the warm breeze, seemingly fixated on the airflow on his hands.

“You miss F1 so much you’re creating your own aerodynamics?” Valtteri asks drily. He glances over, briefly watches the sheen on sunshine playing in Daniel’s hair.  _ God. _

Transient, flickering memories intrude.  _ Gently tracing fingers through those curls, muted delight when they’re actually as springy as they look. _

Valtteri thinks briefly of his own hair and holds back a wince. Hopefully he can get it cut somewhere along this trip, or it’ll start to grow out and Daniel will find out Valtteri’s hair is actually curly, too.

_ God forbid. _ At least the thought is a reverie-interruptor.

Daniel glances back at Valtteri. “You want any music? I came so prepared for this.” He taps the one modern point in the car: a tacky-looking aftermarket radio jammed into the dashboard. Pulling open the glovebox, he produces a handful of CDs, scrawled on with Daniel’s own handwriting.

“You made  _ mixtapes?” _

“It’s not a roadtrip without them,” Daniel grins. 

“It’s 2022,” Valtteri counters. “What about the music that  _ I _ want?”

“We can use Spotify if we get bored, but I’m personally counting that as a failure to adapt to the Rally.” 

The look Valtteri gives him is close to withering. 

Daniel cheerfully ignores his driver, and the jewel cases clatter as he picks out a disc. “You like Daft Punk, right?”

“Go for it, everyone likes Daft Punk.” Valtteri wants to be pissed, but as a self-respecting 90s kid, he can’t in good conscience pretend he hates Daft Punk. God damn the very diplomatic and reasonable choice Daniel’s made.

“I figured we’d probably have the same taste since we’re the same age,” Daniel says, “and if you  _ don’t _ like my music, you will by Mongolia.”

“Uh huh.”

Daniel pops open the disc case and gently slips the CD into the slot. Valtteri squints as the shiny surface reflects glare into his eyes. 

“Here, this’ll be topical,” Daniel grins, mashing a button as  _ Around the World _ starts playing.

Valtteri snorts a laugh despite himself. “Homework was a good album,” he concedes.

“Homework was a fucking  _ seminal _ album, VB. When I’m driving, you pick the music.”

“You want to switch out soon?”

“Let’s take a break after we cross the border into Austria, then I’ll hop in the driver’s seat.”

“Okay.”

Valtteri’s comfortable driving in French techno-filled silence, but he can tell out of the corner of his eye that Daniel’s antsy. He decides to throw him a bone. 

“It’s going to be a long few weeks, huh?”

Daniel drums his fingers along his door armrest. “I imagine it’ll be a lot more interesting once we’re out of countries we’re so familiar with, right? It’s just Austria left and then we’ll be in new territory.”

“I’ve never really driven in the Balkans, yeah.”

“I’m glad you’ve routed us through the Adriatic highway, then.”

“You’d think we’ve had enough of the Mediterranean coast by now, but apparently we have not,” Valtteri laughs.

“Wait, have you ever driven the Pacific Coast highway in Cali?” Daniel asks eagerly, glancing over at him.

Valtteri flashes a smile at his co-pilot. “Not everyone has a boner for America, you know?”

“Is that a no?”

* * *

The Czech/Austrian border is a nonevent, marked only by a road sign. Daniel thumps his chest. “Easiest crossing we’ll have on the whole trip!”

Valtteri produces a stack of post-it notes and hands them to Daniel, eyes still on the road. “Make a tally list. I’ll pull over soon and you can drive.”

“Ooh, getting technical now.” Daniel slaps a neon yellow sheet on the dashboard and makes a note. “Smart man, V.”

They pull over onto the shoulder of the low-traffic, regional highway, and take a bathroom break before Daniel pulls out the snacks.

“Have a break; have a kit-kat,” he says, tossing the wrapped candy across the hood of the car.

Valtteri grabs it out of the air. “I really hate you.”

“You’re not you when you’re hungry,” Daniel quotes innocently.

“I hate you  _ so much, _ actually.”

He folds up the wrapper when he’s done and slips it in his pocket. “You were the type of kid to memorise and quote all the TV advertisements, huh.”

“I think I just kept doing it because my sister hated it, so I guess some things never change,” Daniel replies, opening the driver door and folding himself into the seat. “Alright. Let’s blow this joint.”

Daniel only drives for another hour before the sunset is painting the whole sky golden, and Valtteri pulls out his maps to look for a tent campsite for the night. He directs Daniel to one with minimal confusion, and despite the ramshackle facilities—“looks dodgy as shit,” Daniel comments—their campsite is isolated and the skies are clear. 

Daniel runs frivolous errands—to the camp office for firewood, building a campfire, prying into Valtteri’s camera bag for “documentary reasons”—while Valtteri slips into his informal role as team chef. This role, tonight, consists of dumping canned goods into a saucepan over the campstove, and then handing Daniel a steaming bowl of sodium.

“To the demise of our health,” he says, clinking his tinware bowl against Daniel's in a crude toast. 

“You know what I  _ really _ want, though?” Daniel asks, setting his bowl down a minute later.

Valtteri quirks an eyebrow.

“We’ve got a campfire and no s’mores,” he says, wistful. “If we do this again we need s’mores.”

“It’s only day one. We’ll have s’mores later for sure.”

"Gourmet campfire chef VB does it again." Daniel stretches in his camping chair, tipping his head back. It's a night as cloudless as the day was, and while the horizon is still vaguely orange in the west, scattered stars are beginning to appear in the indigo sky above. 

Valtteri shuffles his feet in the leaf litter that covers the ground, and leans forward to poke the fire with a stick.

"How do you think day one went?" he asks, settling back into his chair.

Daniel shrugs. "You never know how something's gonna go until it starts going, you know?” He glances at Valtteri tentatively. “You’ve been kind of off today, man.”

Valtteri stares at the fire. “My back is killing me?” he says lamely.

“Shut up, that’s not what I mean.”

He dares to make eye contact. Daniel’s not smiling. “I… I don’t want you to regret asking me to come, but I think I’m going to be boring.”

“I mean, I thought about it before asking you. When I called I know I sounded crazy, I know you probably think I’m stupid, but—”

“I don’t.”

Daniel pauses, watching Valtteri from the corner of his eye. “Most people do.”

“And most people think I’m quiet. I’ve known you long enough, mate.”

“‘s true, I guess.”

“I mean, that doesn’t make us best friends,” Valtteri adds cryptically.

Daniel’s silent for a minute.

“I don’t think I’d ask that, I guess. We’ve just always got along well,” he says finally.

“You think?”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe you’re mistaking familiarity for fondness,” Valtteri says quietly, watching Daniel with an inscrutable face.

Daniel turns and fixes him with a look. “I don’t know about you, VB, but I’ve already decided how I feel about you, and no amount of sulky days or frigidity or whatever  _ bullshit _ you might dig up on this trip is going to change that. On purpose or not.”

Valtteri doesn’t answer.

“You can’t bully me into treating you the same way everyone else does.” Daniel turns back to the fire. “That’s the last thing you need right now.”

“I wonder when it stops feeling like you’ve fucked up.”

“I dunno, man. I’m just here to get the fuck over myself and take you along too.”

“Then what?”

Daniel shrugs. “We’ll figure that out, I guess. Watch the sky long enough for a shooting star, and just make a wish that this will be life-changing.”

Valtteri slouches in his chair and looks up at the sky. 

“How do you feel about me?” he asks, finally.

“What?”

“You said you already decided how you feel. What way is it, then?”

“Oh.” Daniel rubs his face, and Valtteri pretends not to watch as he ducks his head. 

Daniel looks like he belongs in the firelight. _ Like he can’t dwell outside the embrace of light and warmth, whether its source is outside himself or within. _

_ Christ. _

“I guess I feel better about you than you feel about me?” Daniel says cautiously. He peeks up at Valtteri, who averts his eyes to the sky again. “You’re kind of a bitch, VB, but I feel like I understand it. Like you wear it, but it’s not your soul or whatever. I feel like… you don’t let yourself enjoy things. Not enough. I wish you’d let yourself have more fun. Especially now, I mean? You know. I… shouldn’t say too much here. 

Valtteri watches him for a second, sits up straight. “Promise me something,” he demands quietly.

“Yeah?”

“You don’t tell the media or anyone  _ anything _ I tell you about F1, or for next year, or about anything at all. And this is mutual. If we want this to be  _ good _ I have to trust you.”

Daniel’s been on the intense side of Valtteri’s gaze before. He looks comfortable there. “Of course,” he agrees. “What happens on the Mongol Rally stays on the Mongol Rally.”

“Fuck you, Vegas Boy,” Valtteri says, but he’s grinning too.

“You alre—”

“No.”

_ “Fine.” _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [VB’s TRAVEL LOG]  
> \- buy marshmellows for dan  
> \- trying to stay off my phone. kept it off today  
> \- write postcard to mom  
> \- weirdly lonely. don’t know what i’m missing tho. easy to drive but hard to let dan


	4. my condensed catharsis

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> shoutouts to CRP for helping a lot with this one. <3

[DR3 + VB77’s Mongol Rally ‘22 album]

[there’s a photo of valtteri, squinting into the sunlight and flipping off the camera, shirtless, with soap suds on his face. on the opposite page, a photo of daniel lying on his back surrounded by multicoloured wildflowers. his t-shirt is printed with florals and his eyes are closed.]

* * *

Morning finds Valtteri crouching beside Arto Kämänen, peering into the wing mirror. He’s got a saucepan full of water warmed over the camp stove, a small bar of soap, a cartridge razor in one hand, and a gleam in his eye. He dips the soap in the water and lathers up.

Daniel picks that moment to unzip the tent and stumble out. He scans the campsite for his teammate, blinking when he focuses on Valtteri. 

“Holy shit, man,  _ why?” _

“Because,” he says nonchalantly, wincing a little as he carefully pulls the razor down his jaw. “Because if I’m going through a breakdown I’m supposed to do something with my hair,” he says finally, faintly laughing, “and I haven’t dyed it for at least ten years, and I can’t cut a fringe.”

_ “Are _ you going through a breakdown?” Daniel asks conversationally, unfolding his camp chair with one shake to take a seat beside the cold ashes of last night’s fire. He leans forward, resting elbows on his knees.

“In theory. You know, if this was a movie.”

“Back to Bottas 1.0, huh?”

“He was a cute guy when he wasn’t sick from dieting,” Valtteri replies measuredly.

Daniel winces. “Point taken.” 

Valtteri shaves methodically, carefully wielding the razor closer to the skin than he has for a while. He hasn’t done a clean shave for years, and this is a terribly improper razor to do it with—his proper beard trimmer forgotten at home—so he has to unclog it with a rinse and a swipe of his thumb after each stroke. He can feel Daniel’s eyes on him but tries not to think about it. 

“Are you going to put a shirt on?” Daniel asks, inscrutably.

Water trickles down Valtteri’s forearms, rapidly cooling and dripping from his elbows. “No, I don’t want to deny you the view. There’s supposed to be a lot of good ones on this trip.”  _ Drip. Drip. _

_ It’s extremely annoying. _

“If you told me I had to drive to Mongolia to get views of your chiseled shoulders in the morning sunlight, I might have done this trip a lot earlier,” Daniel muses out loud.

Valtteri squints at himself and tilts his head. How does anyone ever get used to shaving? He remembers why he quit the baby-face look. “You flatter me a lot,” he says finally, “but I’m glad  _ someone _ gets to enjoy my chiseled shoulders in the morning sunlight.”

His good mood lasts as they hit the road, which will take them still south through Austria’s Alpine foothills and across the Slovenian border. Daniel and Valtteri have no reason to linger in Austria,  _ because, _ Valtteri thinks,  _ nothing interesting can really happen in the Schengen Area. _ Croatia, somehow, feels like where the trip truly starts. 

Daniel drives, and they wind through valleys tucked between forested hills, as Valtteri swears his way through the stack of mixtapes in search of something mutually agreeable. He settles on a CD that starts with a track he’s never heard— 

“Pendulum,” Daniel supplies. “Aussie DnB band from Perth. Always rep the hometown boys.”

—but the note stuck to the jewel case identifies it as  _ Fasten Your Seatbelt. _ Valtteri grins. 

They rev past dark clear rivers tumbling over rocks worn smooth by decades of wear, along sprawling meadows carpeted with flowers neither of them can name. 

“Hey,” Daniel starts, glancing out his window for a moment. 

“Yeah?”

“I’m pulling over.”

He steers the car to the shoulder and jumps out, jogging across the deserted two-lane highway and leaving Valtteri to lean across the centre console and shut off the car. 

“Flowers, VB!” he calls over his shoulder. He doesn’t pause, and shortly disappears over a small crest in the rolling field.

Valtteri scrambles out to follow him, ducking into the backseat for his camera, and leaving Arto with a surreptitious pat on their hood. He jogs after Daniel and is quickly swallowed up by the sheer expanse of breeze and colour surrounding him.

They’re in a vast nest of a valley formed by surrounding hills, but the sun is high and no shadows are cast. He walks up to the man buried in flowers, cradled in the smallest divot in the field’s expanse, and nudges the prone figure with his foot. “What are you doing?”

“I’m on a road trip, man,” Daniel says lazily, eyes closed against the bright sky. He grins. “The hills are fuckin’ alive, VB. I’ve never done this in my life and I’m not going to skip it now.”

The grass is warm when Valtteri sinks into it, settling cross-legged in the flowers beside Daniel. They can afford a break. “Different than most of our time in Austria, for sure.” He fiddles with the lens cap of his camera.

“Can you believe we’ve come here every year, for most of our lives, and never sat in a field of flowers in the mountains?” Daniel demands, eyes still closed.

“It sounds a lot worse when you say it like that.”

“Goddamn.” He opens his eyes and squints, raising himself on one elbow. A bloom near his head waves distractingly in the breeze, and he plucks it with one swift motion. It twirls as he twists it in his fingers, a gentle bluey-purple blur.

He holds it out to Valtteri. “I have no idea what this flower is, but it means  _ Daniel Ricciardo is really fucking happy you came on the Mongol Rally with him.” _

Valtteri takes it gently, his face breaking into an involuntary grin. “What a privilege. I’ll always hold the record for first person to go on the Mongol Rally with Daniel Ricciardo.”

Picking a few bright yellow flowers from around him, he tosses them on Daniel’s chest, where they blend into his floral shirt. “To the old, dead, Dan. A funeral for you now so you can get reborn like you want.”

Daniel looks serene, like he doesn’t feel any of the itchy grass pricklings that are bothering Valtteri right now. “I hope I reincarnate just as sexy as I am right now.”

Valtteri leans forward and places one pink bloom in Daniel’s hair. “Don’t worry, I’ll be the only one looking at you for a while.”

“Does that change anything?” he asks.

“Hmm.” Valtteri doesn’t answer. 

They sit in the open-ended silence, punctuated by the buzz of insects and the occasional rush of passing traffic on the highway. The warm breeze is heady with the scent of wildflowers and grass. Valtteri puts his camera away and tips his face toward the sun. 

_ Rebirth, huh. _

Sunlight hasn’t felt like this for a while.

“You’re wearing sunscreen, right?” Daniel suddenly asks.

Valtteri’s guilty look is enough.

“Alright, add that to the shopping list. What’s the time?” 

He shows his watch. “Should we go?”

Groaning, Daniel sits up. Valtteri watches the flowers tumble down his shirt, and plucks the flower from his curls. “Yeah,” Daniel says. “Especially if we want to hit a supermarket before we cross the border.”

“Alright. Come on, old man, I’ll race you to the car.”

They scramble to their feet.

Valtteri loses.

“Height disadvantage,” he huffs, clicking his seatbelt. 

Neither of them are short of breath, and Daniel’s smile is smug. “Nice to know the old man’s still got it.”

They take off, southward again. Valtteri picks bits of grass from his track pants and watches the wind whip them from his fingers as he flicks them out the open window. The car smells like green life, not as brashly bright as a hayfield, but a gentle reminder that mountain meadows feel like a natural habitat.

* * *

About 20km from the border, they stop for groceries and essentials in a postcard-worthy town full of brightly coloured buildings. Valtteri picks up sunscreen at a corner shop before they head to a supermarket, where he hands Daniel a post-it note shopping list and points him toward the produce section. He quickly finds what he’s looking for in the unhealthier aisles, swings by dairy for some cheese, and Daniel finds him critically eyeing not-quite-fresh bread.

"Whatcha looking for?"

Valtteri huffs, placing an unsatisfactory loaf of rye back on the shelf. "If we're having beans on toast for supper, we can at least use nice bread while it's possible." He looks at the basket Daniel carries. “Did you get strawberries?”

“Yeah, but the pears looked like ass so I just got more apples. Can we get pumpernickel? I don’t mind that.” He tosses a marginally better loaf at Valtteri, who ruefully feels the crust and nods. 

“Yeah. Let’s go now.”

“I don’t even know if I  _ like _ pumpernickel,” Daniel chatters, nudging Valtteri to steer him toward the checkout lanes. “When I was a kid I thought the name was cool, and it looked different from the other bread, especially from the shop where my mum bought it, because—”

Valtteri tunes out as he starts unpacking the basket onto the checkout lane. Daniel leans against the ubiquitous gum-and-candy-and-magazines rack, rummaging through the produce Valtteri places on the conveyor, sorting the items in an order that seems to be personal habit.

_ Cold items first? _ Valtteri thinks idly.  _ Heavy items last? Or are they— _

“Aww, you got marshmallows!” Daniel touches the packet with near reverence. “For  _ me? _ You didn’t have to, VB.”

He shrugs, but at least half his mouth is smiling. “It would be a shame to waste the campfires, obviously. You’re paying, besides.”

Daniel groans, dragging his wallet from his pocket, and ambles over to the bored cashier as he begins scanning their items. 

Glancing over the vaguely familiar candy brands on the rack, Valtteri reaches for a pack of gum to add to their haul when the magazines catch his eye: the usual combination of the trashiest tabloids, pop health bullshit, sports news, and home and garden publications. 

His gaze freezes on the title of a motorsport magazine, F1 sure to be the main subject—this is Austria, after all—and he looks away quickly. He shouldn’t look back. He knows he’ll look back. His stomach is already twisting with the knowledge that this is a very bad idea, when he turns back to it. Splashed on the cover along with the eternal Max and Charles, there’s George Russell, and—he’s in Williams’ 2022 kit. 

His arm slung around Nicholas Latifi like he’d never even left.

“No bags, please,” he hears Daniel say to the cashier, but the sound is blurry and muffled, as though heard from underwater. He reaches forward to pick up the magazine, but his hand falters an inch away and falls back to his side. 

_ George. Huh. _

Fuck.

Valtteri would never claim to be fluent in German, but he knows enough to understand  _ Zweite Chance für Russell bei Williams _ doesn’t mean anything good for him. 

Blinking quickly, he takes a stabilising breath, though it’s shallower than he’d like. He scans the cover again, catching his own name in the corner, though the words around it are unfamiliar. 

“Dan?” His throat is dry when he finally speaks.

He doesn’t have to watch Daniel’s face crumple as he points to the magazine rack, but he does anyway. The sharp wince in the retired driver’s face is almost cathartic, a confirmation of  _ yes, this situation is pure shit. _

“Is this real?”

The twist of Daniel’s mouth is confirmation, along with a limp shrug.

“Why didn’t I know?”

Daniel looks almost guilty. “I was… you were staying off your phone and didn’t bring it up, so I didn’t—you know, ignorance is bliss?” he adds helplessly.

“And—”

“Why don’t you go outside? Wait in the car, I’ll be there in a sec.” The words are bland, but Daniel’s eyes are sharp, and he accompanies the suggestion with a tiny but pointed jerk of his head.

Valtteri’s stomach burns—though whether it’s shame, anger, embarrassment, it’s too early to tell—and he doesn’t even turn to see the curious eyes looking his way, just stumbles to the door and keeps his head down as he speed-walks to the car. 

He wrenches open the passenger door and slumps into the seat, slamming the door behind him. In the silence and the pounding of blood in his own ears, he closes his eyes.

_ Don’t think about it. _

Of course Britain’s favourite young prodigy isn’t homeless—seatless—for too long. Claire’s probably ecstatic.

_ Don’t think about it. _

Williams finally on the upswing this year, now new and improved with the driver they never wanted to lose to Mercedes in the first place.

_ Don’t fucking think about it. _

He can’t find it in him to be mad at Claire.

Daniel’s back a minute later, a cardboard box rattling in his arms before he shoves it into the backseat. The door thumps shut and the car rocks a little, and Valtteri can feel the presence in the car.

The silence breaks.

“I’m sorry, man, I just didn’t want anyone to, y’know, put two and two together. Thought it would be best to get you out before anyone pulled out a phone.”

Valtteri swallows. 

Daniel turns the key, and the car starts with a rattle and the hiss of the speakers. “Fuck off, Post Malone,” he says absently to the radio, shutting it off with a vicious prod at the buttons. “Seatbelt, VB?”

He opens his eyes and settles properly in his seat, sitting up straight and buckling himself in. Daniel doesn’t comment on his choice to not drive, though they’d planned to switch. 

“Let’s roll,” Daniel says, but there’s no energy in it. He holds out the forgotten pack of gum, placing it on the centre console when Valtteri doesn’t take it. 

They leave town on a regional road in silence, even Arto Kämänen running quietly as if in fear of provoking something. Valtteri stares out the window. 

He feels a sudden kinship to the poor sap from F2 who has doubtlessly been unceremoniously tossed out to make room for George. He wants to feel sorry for him—wants to begin grasping the ripple effects of this move—but paralysis feels like Valtteri’s only option right now.

_ “We were united as a team and we are no less together now than we have ever been,” _ Toto speaks hazily in some corner of Valtteri’s mind.  _ “As we are all in the same boat, we are grateful for the history we have had, and we go forward unfortunately apart on separate paths but together in our memories.” _

And then, of course, Toto defected. It had been easy to look stoic while delivering one last speech, flanked by pet project George Russell and good old ride-or-die Valtteri Bottas. It had been a comfort for Valtteri to share subtle but empathetic glances with George. And they hadn’t talked about it, but Valtteri had always taken a scrap of solace from the fact that even if Toto was full of shit, at least George was one person who understood the betrayal in the same way. 

Valtteri’s stomach twists involuntarily as he realises George had never understood.

George hadn’t had the pinnacle of the world dangled in front of him for five years straight—hadn’t had a life dream repeatedly snatched from ahead of him by some malignant combination of shitty luck, partisanship, simple inadequacy, and the shadow of greatness.

Maybe every glance from George had held more pity than solidarity.

Valtteri grits his teeth, forces himself to keep his eyes open, gazing blankly out the car window. He read somewhere, in some nameless magazine in one of the eternal airport boarding gates, that looking at something bright would help keep you from crying.

If he was in George’s racing boots, he’d pity Valtteri Bottas too.

“You okay?” Daniel asks, glancing over.

“Yeah,” he replies, and they both know he isn’t, but also that he’s not the type to leave a question unanswered in petty silence. 

Keeping his eyes on the road, Daniel hands him a water bottle. “Drink up,” he says simply.

“Thanks.”

“I’d let you get absolutely smashed tonight, but—”

“No,” he says quietly, capping the bottle.

“Not a good coping mechanism if you’re trying to get reborn, yeah.”

Valtteri turns to hand back the half-empty water bottle, and watches Daniel’s eyes widen. 

“Shit, VB, you don’t look good. Hang on a second.” They drive for a minute longer before Daniel pulls the car over on a straight, and turns on the hazards. 

He twists the keys in the ignition and suddenly there’s only silence. 

“D’you want to talk about it?”

Valtteri looks at him. 

He wants to tell Daniel he’s okay, it’ll be okay, leave him alone like a sick dog and he’ll be operational after a two-day long silent breakdown. That if he can just curl up in the back seat and pretend he’s on his couch again, he can sleep off the screaming in his head and be fine after a week of non-existence.

But he won’t tell Daniel that, because it’s not even true. No amount of silence is going to resolve damage done by years in the shadow of tacit yet pointed threats. 

You can’t just sleep off being eaten with unspoken and unspeakable grief.

It sounds really fucking tragic to say that. He takes a shuddery breath and lets Daniel meet his eyes.

Daniel unbuckles his seatbelt, arranging himself to lean back against the driver door, and pulls a leg up on the seat. He looks comfortable. He looks like he’ll wait.

_ His socks are patterned with pancakes, _ Valtteri notices. He doesn’t know what to say.

There’s no one to blame for the way he feels betrayed right now. 

Just, maybe, himself.

For being too old, or too slow, or for imagining that the world would stay still enough for him to fuck off to Mongolia and then have a space to fit him in later. When he should have been fighting, sending private emails and taking secret calls and meetings from the minute his year collapsed.

Several months before his year collapsed, to pull off a move as clean as George’s.

_ Fuck George. _

Valtteri knows he never had the artifice to enjoy mind games, either within a team or between them. The fresh blood in the paddock have much sharper teeth.

He takes it back.  _ You’re unfucked, George. _ George will get put through the wringer enough, without the casual curse of a heartsick man who dropped off the map weeks ago.

“It’s not dramatic to call it trauma, VB,” Daniel says suddenly. “It’s a fucking pressure cooker in there.”

“I’m not  _ there _ anymore,” he says, listless. 

Daniel’s reply is quick but soft. “Just because you don’t snap in F1 doesn’t mean you can’t snap after.”

“I didn’t expect it to feel like anything. Like when I was out it would be then over.” He fidgets with his seatbelt, running his thumb along the edge of the belt fabric.

“I mean, plenty of drivers get hung up on—on everything, whether they finish well or not.” Daniel pauses. “Some are lucky enough to work out their own failure through their kids, some work out the pain in another series. Some just haunt the paddock looking for resolution. Closure, I guess. Even if they left well.”

Neither of them need to provide names.

He doesn’t say anything more, and Valtteri doesn’t trust himself to open his mouth. The silence is ugly, so he digs his phone from his pocket—it still rides there, he’d probably feel incomplete without the constant pressure against his leg—and turns it on. The power button bites into his thumb.

“Hey.” 

He looks up, seeing Daniel with his hand out, palm up.

“You know you shouldn’t, man.”

“Yeah, I guess so.” He drops the phone into Daniel’s hand and pulls back, pulls away, into his own space again. The window is warm where he leans his head against it. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he says finally.

“Do you want to take a break?”

_ I want to go home. _

* * *

He can’t go home, but he puts on his sunglasses and curls up against the window, and Daniel lets him choose the music, and promises they won’t spend too much longer driving today. 

“You want some sad shit?” Daniel asks, glancing over as Valtteri slowly flips through the bundle of CDs again.

He shrugs. Daniel takes that as a yes, and points out a disc labeled  _ words on the tip of my tongue, _ written in neat marker. “That’s my condensed catharsis,” he explains minimally. 

It’s an acute mix, but Valtteri only catches snatches of lyrics as he idly watches the Slovenian landscape slip by. Neither of them noticed when they crossed the border, but he takes a moment to add to the sticky note on the dashboard. 

The sky is darkening as they wind along a narrow highway, and the cool evening air fills the car from Daniel’s open window. He’s singing so quietly, under his breath, that it feels too intensely private for Valtteri to be hearing. 

_ “Stop, disown fear, I’ll be there if you need a friend… my dear,” _ he sings softly, the mildest smile on his face.

Maybe it’s just the shadows. Valtteri looks away.

* * *

“You know how it is with pressure cookers,” Daniel says conversationally. “They take time to vent before you can open them up.”

* * *

The simple dinner plan from earlier turns out to have been a good idea, as they make camp for the night. After squinting at the map in the dimming daylight, Daniel followed a few side roads which led them to a well-hidden river valley flanked by groves and meadow. It's silent but for the smooth rush of breeze and water, and the occasional dusk birdcall. 

He heats the food mechanically, and his hand shakes as he passes Daniel's plate to him, but neither mention it.

The exhaustion hits like a wave, after feeling frayed for hours on end. It's a delicate act to breathe smoothly, listen to his teammate, be helpful—simply be responsive—when his heart's desire is to shut down. He scrapes together the energy to take a dip in the river, and comes out feeling certainly cleaner, but Daniel's presence is hovering and Valtteri doesn't know why he feels it so  _ keenly. _

_ It's okay. It just feels like I'm burdening him. _

So he leaves Daniel sitting on the bank and goes to bed, relieved to finally collapse in the tiny tent. Sleep doesn't come as easily as he hoped, though, and after a lot of rustling and hushed noises, Daniel tucks himself in bed as well. The mattresses are wedged together so tightly he feels every movement the other man makes.

He can hear quiet breathing just an arm's length away, and it slows, growing regular as they lay there. His own breaths must be short and ragged, because Daniel rolls over to face him.

“I’m sorry about—what happened to you,” he says softly, into the dark.

_ It’s not about what happened to me, _ Valtteri wants to say.  _ It’s about what didn’t. _

He doesn’t say anything.

_ It's about what I didn't do for myself. It's about what I did. _

“I should go,” he says hoarsely, struggling to sit up in his sleeping bag, but it’s tangled around his feet.

“Where?”

“Just—out, for a bit.” He kicks futilely at his bedding and reaches for the zip.

“No,” Daniel says almost sharply. He sits up too, a soft shape in the darkness.“Stay. I don’t want you wandering off, or—doing something stupid, or… give me a second.”

There's a rustling of nylon and the buzz of the tent zipper as Daniel slips out. 

Valtteri crumples into his mattress again and rolls over, stuffs his face into his pillow and tries to calm his breathing.  _ In. Hold it. Out. Pause. In. _

Crickets, footsteps crunching in the leaf litter.

_ Hold it. _

The metal creak of the car door opening, a soft bump.

_ Out. _

The softest tap of the door shutting, more steps.

_ Pause. _

The zipper buzzes again, two thumps as kicked-off shoes hit the ground, and Daniel crouches inside the tent again.

“Hey.”

“Sorry,” Valtteri croaks, muffled by the pillow. Daniel bumps his mattress while crawling onto his own, and the whole bedroll shakes.

“Don’t be, man,” Daniel says, whispering. “It happens.”

_ It does? _

Daniel slips back into his own sleeping bag but doesn't do the zip—it's a warm night. "VB," he says lowly. "Maybe you want this." 

Valtteri feels Daniel place something softly against his back and reluctantly turns over, holding his breath. 

_ If you don't breathe you can't cry. _

The scent of laundry soap hits him first, before he touches softness and runs his hand across the familiar worn cotton of his quilt.

"Thanks," he says hoarsely, brushing fingertips across that piece of home in near reverence.

He blinks quickly, grateful for the dark, and swallows the painful lump in his throat. There’s a crushing ache in his chest and tendrils of anxious pain curling in his stomach. Valtteri opens his mouth but finds no words in his throat.

"C'mere," Daniel murmurs, and he doesn’t wait for Valtteri to move but leans closer, tugging carefully at the folds of the blanket to shake it open. He sits up a little to gently push the sleeping bag off of Valtteri’s shoulders and drape the quilt around him instead, warm hands skimming against bare shoulders. He tucks it in with steady hands and settles back into his own bedding. 

Though his eyes are adjusted to the darkness, Valtteri only sees Daniel as a warm shadow in the grey stillness. It feels safe enough that he doesn’t turn away.

“You can take time,” Daniel says. That’s all he says. He reaches out, places a hand on Valtteri’s cheek— 

—and Valtteri doesn’t let himself think  _ it feels like it fits there— _

—and Daniel doesn’t say anything about the hot tears he finds there.

He just says softly, “As much time as you want.”

Valtteri releases a trembling breath and reaches up to touch Daniel’s wrist. He pulls the hand from his face and moves it to his shoulder instead. 

There are no words needed as Daniel simply shifts, slipping his arm around Valtteri’s back and tugging him close. Cocooned between his blanket and the worn fabric of Daniel’s shirt, the ache in Valtteri’s chest refuses to ease but finally snaps. 

_ It hurts. _ And he shivers, not from the cold but from the wound. But Daniel pulls him closer and lets him bury his face in that worn shirt, and doesn’t move as he finally cries. 

_ For what didn’t happen. For what I did to myself. _

_ For what will never happen. _

Surrendering the anguish will always be a blurry memory. Acute release isn’t something he consciously allows, but it bursts from him a response to a pain that would obliterate if not answered.

Valtteri fights his breath to control his hyperventilating gasps, easing himself out of emotional demolition as exhaustion absorbs him. His throat still burns and his eyes sting, but the tightness in his heart is dispersed to an impalpable ache. “Sorry,” he breathes muzzily into Daniel’s damp shirt. “I’m very sorry.” There’s a hand rubbing slow circles across his shoulders, and Daniel stills when he hears Valtteri’s voice.

“You can take as much time as you want,” he repeats lowly, and it sounds like a promise. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [VB’s TRAVEL LOG]  
> \- [there’s a pressed gentian flower taped in this page, and no writing other than the date]


	5. karma, you little asshole

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so this has taken nearly two months to update—rip to the myth of weekly updates—but it's kind of long, and it took so many directions it wasn't supposed to! world events have been a Lot, and F1's actually back now. this is also where things might start getting horny, but you'll get a better heads-up when it's more than just a gaze.
> 
> CONTENT WARNING: for mild food/diet discussion. it's just a thing for drivers and will be mentioned here and there for the rest of the fic
> 
> thanks so much to everyone onboard reading this; you're why this keeps going <3

[DR3 + VB77’s Mongol Rally ‘22 album]

[there’s an out-of-focus photo of valtteri in the driver’s seat of the car at golden hour. his face is half turned toward the camera and his mouth is open, caught in the middle of talking. on the opposite page, a photo of a clothesline tied from the roof rack of arto kämänen to a nearby tree. hanging on the clothesline are two pairs of swimming shorts, and in the background is a rock beach and the sea.]

* * *

Valtteri wakes up, vaguely conscious of still being engulfed in warmth. He painfully blinks his eyes open to see cool grey light filtering through the nylon tent, but Daniel's arm still holds him tucked close, although at some point his bedmate must have gotten chilly—Daniel's wrapped himself under the quilt as well. 

He closes his eyes and dozes off, and when he wakes up again, Daniel's gone and there's a clatter outside. 

Valtteri sits up, clutching his blanket. Head pounding from dehydration, but dying for a run to the nonexistent bathroom, he winces. Before last night, it’d been a long time since he cried himself to sleep. _Good to know it feels just as shit as ever._

He drapes the blanket around his neck and unzips the tent, in search of a shirt and some breakfast. But Daniel's ducking into the tent at the same time, and Valtteri stumbles into him as he straightens up. Liquid splashes from the steaming tin mug in Daniel's hand, and he jumps back.

"Oh, _shit_ that'sreallyhot. You want your coffee?"

* * *

The day’s itinerary covers tearing down the Adriatic Highway, which involves the first real border crossing of the rally: Slovenia to Croatia. 

Valtteri climbs into the driver’s seat as Daniel scans the campsite one last time for garbage. Their seatbelts click in unison and Arto Kämänen revs onto the dirt side-road and they wind their way back to the main highway. 

It’s a wordless but not uncomfortable silence, and Daniel sorts through the mixtapes to eventually select an unfamiliar lofi hip hop mix. Valtteri’s zoned out, trying to lull himself with the slow highway, the hillside terrain just complex enough to be interesting. He doesn’t say anything about yesterday, though he can feel Daniel thinking about it. Several times he glances over to see Daniel open his mouth, think better of himself, and shut it.

Toto’s mandatory team meditation sessions were always a drag, like a slow church sermon on a begrudged Sunday morning. Never an event where Valtteri excelled, but right now he finds himself wishing he could at least summon his pre-race mental focus techniques. 

The sting of thinking of George has abated somewhat since yesterday—the responsible part of his brain realises this should have been a totally expected move. But without somewhere else for the anger to dissipate, it circles in Valtteri’s chest. He shifts restlessly in his seat, wishing it were a little easier to breathe, but the ache from last night re-settles. It’s numbing, like a bracelet slightly too tight on a wrist. The pain is just dull enough to blink away, but it helps to focus on a pain that's more physical than mental.

“More coffee?” Daniel asks, proffering an open thermos. He sounds normal, and it’s a relief. It smells tempting and Valtteri takes it silently, and burns his tongue and throat when he takes a gulp.

He tastes the ghost of Daniel’s coconut lip balm.

Licking his lips, he hands the thermos back. “Thanks.”

The Slovenia-to-Croatia border crossing is the day’s largest roadblock. With wait times allegedly anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours, Valtteri’s not surprised when they roll up to a long queue of cars at the Rupa border crossing. Daniel leans out the window to wave at a small convoy of other dust-worn cars, made familiar by large _Mongol Rally_ decals slapped on their doors. Valtteri spends the hour in the queue busying himself with paperwork, pulling files from his backpack and handing Daniel the papers they’ll need to enter Croatia. 

Perhaps a lifetime of travel has taught Valtteri nothing if not how to make himself understood in a patchwork of Euro English, a sprinkling of phrasebook knowledge, and a healthy dose of hand gestures. Or more likely, the border agents are just used to dealing with tourist hordes who approach waving Anglosphere passports. While Daniel peers anxiously across the dashboard, Valtteri fields questions on the nature of their trip—the border agent at first mechanical, then curious and amused as she flips through their passports. 

Less than a minute later, they’re free and Valtteri motions to Daniel to return the paperwork to his bag. “You’re not bad at that,” Daniel comments, as they pull onto the open highway again. “Welcome to new territory.”

* * *

The clouds clear and the sky turns blue as they near the sea, and Daniel passes Valtteri his sunglasses before he can even ask.

“Thanks,” Valtteri mutters, slipping them on. 

Daniel shrugs. Fake static crackles through the car speakers.

Valtteri clears his throat. “Thanks for a lot, I mean,” he says quietly. “Yesterday was a pretty… bad look on me.”

“It happens,” Daniel says mildly. It’s an echo of his words last night. “I’m pretty sure I can’t even tell you what the stages of grief are, so I’m not an expert here.”

“It’s like when you have a sick cat and you have to take them to the vet.” Shoulder check, lane change. Valtteri’s glance flickers to the mirror. “And they don’t want to be there so you wrap them in a towel for them to calm down.”

Daniel’s silent for a moment before he laughs, but he still sounds confused. “I’m more of a dog person, but I’ll take your word for it.”

“Still feels like shit, though.” Valtteri keeps his voice even. 

“What are you gonna do about it?” Daniel glances at him, bites his lip. “You can be level with me if you want; nothing else going on. You know. No one else to talk to.”

“Lucky for me, I guess,” Valtteri says, watching Daniel out of the corner of his eye. The statement is free of malice, more amicable than Daniel had been expecting. “I’ll drive it off. You hold on to my phone, probably. Not punch any walls. Cry a little at night,” he adds drily. 

“How’s it going right now?”

“You don’t have to keep asking.” He feels terrible. This morning was manageable, but he only feels more keyed-up as Daniel pokes the wound, even though Daniel may feel he’s only approaching with disinfectant and bandages. “You can shut up again for a bit.”

“The bitch is back, huh.”

“Yeah, sure.”

Daniel puts on his own sunglasses and shuts up.

* * *

Valtteri drives it off, blinking away thoughts of Daniel’s warmth last night, and turns down lunch to let hunger pangs override the anxiety in his stomach. Yesterday’s ill-fated pack of gum lies abandoned on the dashboard, and he viciously chews a piece. It’s a hapless defiance, but at least it’s a piece of gum.

* * *

“Sorry I told you to shut up.” Valtteri apologises, his tone almost confessional, but not guilty.

“Are you saying that to make _yourself_ feel better?” Daniel’s voice is rough, one silent hour later.

“Yeah.”

“I’ll take it anyway, but you’re still a bitch.”

“What can I say, it’s a brand at this point.”

* * *

Arto Kämänen is quiet as they run at low speed among the holiday traffic, and Daniel smudges his window with fingerprints as he idly watches the sea pass by. 

They stop at a roadside cafe for a snack and a break, and it’s a total tourist trap but the coastal views are impeccable, and the British couple at the next table over are having a wonderfully embarrassing argument to eavesdrop on. Daniel hides a tell-tale smirk behind a glass of local Croatian wine, and Valtteri takes a sip when Daniel offers, but no more because in half an hour they’re on the road again and Valtteri stays in the driver’s seat. 

“Have you thought about what happens if we don’t make it to Mongolia?” Valtteri asks, finally. It’s a large possibility neither of them have voiced; Valtteri doesn’t know why he’s pushing it now.

The question hangs in the air, the third passenger in the car, before Daniel strikes it down. “We’re making it.”

“Anything could happen, you know.”

“We’re fucking making it, okay?”

Valtteri doesn’t reply.

“I’m kind of in the mood to finish something the way I planned.”

“For once,” Valtteri adds. Daniel doesn’t cringe, nor return the blow. The truth is read in the hollowness of Valtteri’s voice: he means it only for himself. 

The sky is painfully bright, and he wonders, almost gloomily but with a hint of wry shame, when they’ll have a rainy day on this trip. The universe has no time to coddle him with a depressive atmosphere, or maybe it’s just the weather surrounding Daniel. _God damn him._

Five kilometres through Bosnia and Herzegovina earn them another sticky note on the dash, and as the afternoon passes them by on the coastal highway, the sun’s descent over the sea casts a headache-inducing sparkle into their field of view. To Valtteri’s chagrin, Daniel grabs his camera bag and doubtlessly wastes several exposures on the roll of film. 

“Who’s the bitch now?” he gripes.

“Shut up, man,” Daniel says, turning the camera on Valtteri. The shutter clicks after a considered moment. “You could teach me how to use this properly, though.”

“You must have used film as a kid, though?”

Daniel shrugs. “The camera was on me more than I held it. Waterproof disposables at parties were more in my lane.” He tosses his iPhone into a flip and grabs it out of the air. “This thing does too much work for me.”

“We’ll see where I can buy more film,” Valtteri says finally, closing down the topic. 

Dubrovnik’s tourist traffic hits like a wall, and despite a well-crafted world-weariness, Valtteri’s happy to allow himself to get sucked into a familiar yet new maze of colourful umbrellas and stony streets, which rumble with the same over-bright rhythm of every other coastal tourist trap he’s been to on the Med, but this time with Game of Thrones merch. 

“Let’s get a hotel,” he finds himself suggesting. The familiarly bland unknown of a vacationer’s city lulls him, and his shoulders relax even as the streets clog with traffic. “Hot showers, we can do a little laundry. Eat something that’s not a sandwich, or something I dumped out of a can.”

Daniel rattles through the pages of the maps. “Montenegro tomorrow, then?”

A shrug. “Sure, if you want. Maybe if we’re interested we stay here for a bit longer?” He extends the hint of interest and watches Daniel pounce. 

“Awesome. Nothing like being a disgusting tourist,” he says contentedly. “Time to dig out my _nice_ shirts.”

* * *

Mongol Rally on an F1 driver dime turns out to have perks when indulged. Daniel’s still wearing the day’s grime and a battered t-shirt when he hops out of the car, and both men get a reluctant once-over from the desk clerk at the five-star hotel in Dubrovnik’s Old Town, but the black card Daniel slides from his wallet is enough to cover a multitude of sins.

“You’re a massive idiot,” Valtteri says out of the side of his mouth as they wave away the bellhop. 

“Never the wrong time to flex,” Daniel replies brightly, wedging himself into the tiny elevator that’s been retrofitted into the certified historic building. He flicks the second key card at Valtteri. “God, I hope there’s only one bed.”

“We can go sleep in the tent tonight if you want a cuddle, mate.”

“Enjoyed last night?” Daniel leers with a backward glance, shouldering the room door open. 

“Fuck off.” Valtteri bites the inside of his cheek and decides to say it. “You enjoyed the last time I spooned you well enough.” He drops his backpack on an armchair. “Tough luck for you, anyway. Two beds.” At that, he steps into the washroom and shuts the door. 

_Fuck._

The way Daniel’s mouth had dropped open was unmistakable. _So you’ve finally decided to acknowledge that we slept together—_ the wordless understanding passes between them— _once upon a time._

Valtteri washes his hands restlessly and peers at himself in the mirror. There’s a flush on his cheekbones, a bit of a sunburn. Maybe more of a blush than he wants to admit. 

He couldn’t have avoided the topic while spending weeks together in a tin can, he tells himself. Maybe getting it out now, sooner rather than later, has saved a worse situation later, if the topic had fallen into Daniel’s control. Valtteri has an uncomfortable suspicion that he’s more susceptible to answering Daniel than he wishes. 

_Anyway, does it change anything?_ It would be a lie to say he hadn’t been thinking about that night more than was healthy. Judging by the way his skin burns when Daniel looks at him, it’s clear he’s not over it. 

Judging by how often Daniel looks, that man’s obviously not over it either.

It’s one thing to fuck someone and know you’ll barely be around to see them later. It’s another when you fuck them, try to dip, then end up as teammates. And Valtteri knows this is hardly an F1 team—the quarters are even closer.

Worse, Valtteri _wants_ to regret it. If he properly regrets it, he could laugh at himself for it. But though his mouth is cold, his cheeks are warm.

He shrugs off the urge to bare his teeth at himself in the mirror—silly, childish, Daniel would do that—and steps out.

Daniel’s standing at the window, buttoning up a garishly floral shirt which is clearly too large for him. But the gibe in Valtteri’s throat dies as Daniel turns back to him with a small smile. The bright fabric drapes softly over his shoulders, and shines dully in the filtered sunlight. The Daniel of ugly florals always seemed to belong to the streets of Monaco, or St. Tropez, the shirts worn with a giant grin and designer sunglasses—a far cry from the softly worn roadtrip Daniel, who perches his KIMOA shades in his hair and frowns over road maps, and wears t-shirts worn thin and dull with washing. 

There are still grins, but they’re less a fixture and more a feature. 

Valtteri realises he’s missed the fancy shirts, and the version of Daniel who wore them. That Daniel may have been more contrived, but it was a model that Valtteri knew how to handle, if not understand. 

This new version is a different story. It feels like he’s seeing too much. 

* * *

Dinner is expensive and bland, and the only thought Valtteri has is that it’s taken less than a week to feel uncomfortable with a napkin and proper cutlery. It’s all wrong, Daniel should be at his shoulder in a camping chair, their feet stretched toward a campfire, and the scene punctuated with the scrape of tinware and birdsong in the open air. 

He drops his dinner fork and almost jumps when it jangles to the stone tiles of the restaurant patio. Daniel turns to wave down a waiter, but Valtteri grabs his arm across the table. _“Don’t,”_ he mutters sharply, and drops Daniel’s wrist from his grasp. Catching himself on the sharp edge of a stare, he stares back, in case the shock turns to pity. It doesn’t, and Daniel just smiles, almost shy.

Valtteri picks up his forgotten salad fork and halfheartedly stabs the under-seasoned mess on his plate, before flinging the utensil back down again.

“You want anything else, or you wanna get out of here?” Daniel asks, almost casual but for the warmth of his glance at Valtteri.

“Let’s get out of here.” Valtteri rubs his face and looks away. “But you’re not done yet.”

“Neither are you?”

“Food’s uh—it’s okay, I’ve ate too much already.”

“Are you _hungry?”_ he pushes.

Valtteri’s laugh is short, and he doesn’t speak.

“You’re not an F1 driver anymore,” Daniel says, cautiously. He clinks the tip of his knife against Valtteri’s plate. “You’re _supposed_ to eat now.”

“Fuck off, mate, like I need the reminder.” The chastisement is mild, but Valtteri drowns a deep breath in a gulp of ice water. “Let’s get out of here,” he repeats, but he doesn’t let Daniel make eye contact.

“Okay, I’ve got this.” Daniel takes his wallet from his pocket and forces a laugh as he uses his thumb to slide a card out. “Have you paid for _anything_ yet, man?”

Still hiding behind his water glass, Valtteri smiles against the rim. “Not even the marshmallows.”

“That’s what they call sugar daddy behaviour,” Daniel shoots back, smiling too widely at his own joke. After the last decade, Valtteri knows what a fake Ricciardo smile looks like. This is a textbook case, and it’s his fault.

He has to fix it. 

“You like that, don’t you,” he responds lowly, setting his glass down and licking his lips just carefully enough that it looks deliberate. Of course it’s deliberate, and after the last decade, Daniel knows what Valtteri’s tongue looks like. _Christ._

Daniel looks anyway. “Don’t mind if I do,” he says, and the sun has long set behind the surrounding buildings, but in the shaded evening, Daniel’s eyes are warm and bright as he leans his elbows on the table to rest his chin on his hands. 

“Mongolia’s an odd date, pretty special way to spoil someone.” Valtteri tilts his head infinitesimally and lets himself be seen, eyes open wide. He lets Daniel look, watching the stiffness melt from his face as the Ricciardo smile takes over. It’s just a penance for being snippy, Valtteri tells himself. Letting Daniel play his game is only fair, and so what if Valtteri enjoys it too? That’s _firmly_ a mere side effect.

“I only take the hottest ones to Mongolia,” Daniel mock confides, lowering his voice and leaning forward. “Special place for a special guy.”

Oh, the _implications._ Daniel’s eyes are hungry and Valtteri bites the inside of his lip, feeling himself blush—what the hell, it’s not hurting anyone to let them dramatically avoid what they’ve already been pointedly _not saying_ — 

“Generous of you,” he says, suddenly actually flustered, allowing his blush to get the better of him. He sets down his glass and blinks, dropping his gaze, but Daniel reaches forward to seize his hand—his cold, clammy hand wet with ice water condensation, very not sexy—and Valtteri lets him curl their fingers together. It doesn’t feel like his own hand being gripped, and Valtteri watches the tiny tattoo on Daniel’s finger with reassuring detachment. It’s the game. He suddenly feels safer.

A waiter materialises by the table to tentatively interrupt. “Are you two finished up?” 

Daniel springs back in his chair, yanking his hand free, and looks up. “Yeah, that was great,” he says sheepishly, glancing back at Valtteri, with a grin. “I’ll take the bill, thanks.”

They leave a moment later, Valtteri casting one look back at the dropped fork under the table, but then he turns away to follow Daniel and get lost in the winding streets, crowded with other tourists. The day-warm stone buildings still radiate heat, and lights glow from every window as dusk falls.

“Where were we again?” Daniel asks suddenly, and he glances down at Valtteri, with a real smile now. Valtteri doesn’t have anything to say, just shoves his hands in his pockets and bumps Daniel’s shoulder with his own.

“Dubrovnik, Croatia,” he says finally, acutely aware that’s not what Daniel meant. But the wistfulness in his own voice surprises him. “We’re in Croatia and we’re being horrible tourists.”

“What do you wanna do now? It’s still early, so unless you really want to sleep…”

Valtteri’s shoes scuff on the cobbles. “Let’s just walk,” he decides quickly. “We don’t really have an itinerary, I don’t know what’s in this city. Besides Game of Thrones shit.”

Daniel shrugs. “Sounds good to me. Let’s go to the wall by the sea, then?”

“West, yeah. Following the sunset should take us there.” 

“Romantic, huh.”

Without warning, Daniel slings an arm around Valtteri’s shoulders and Valtteri stumbles in surprise before falling in with the taller man’s pace. His grip is firm and it’s not quite a hug, but it’s close. Valtteri’s uncomfortably soothed. 

Teammates bump fists and slap each other on the back. He shouldn’t feel _soothed._

 _You’re so touchy,_ he wants to say. But they’re trapped in a bubble of self-aware, slow-motion drama, and if either of them reach to burst it, they’ll have to spring apart, and Daniel’s face will be consumed by concern again. 

Valtteri rarely feels the need to apologise for what others often call _being a little shit._ But his stomach twists when he sees the stress in Daniel’s eyes, and isn’t apologising the right thing to make up for it? 

The tiniest part of him is eaten with the awareness that his crime hasn’t been pettiness—for once—and he hears a candid voice in his head saying something blurry about _grief,_ and _lashing out,_ and _patience,_ but he lets the rhythm of his footsteps drown it out. Easier for them both to pretend he’s been a little shit. 

Rather, easier for him to pretend and force Daniel to go along with it.

_Doesn’t that still make you the bad guy?_

Pushing through sudden shallow breaths and blurry vision, Valtteri feels like he’s going to walk the soles off his shoes. 

“Hold on, VB, you’re walking way too fast,”

Daniel steers them out of the path of foot traffic and turns toward Valtteri. It feels like they’re in the car again—Daniel pulling over to take his mental temperature. Valtteri’s flushed again despite the cooling air, and Daniel shakes him gently by the shoulder. 

“Come on, man, talk to me,” he says. “About anything. You’re going to fuck yourself up again.”

They’ve reached the wall, and the sea, and they climb the twisting stairs to the top without exchanging any words. The horizon gleams red and orange, tracing a shimmering path on the water in the same hues, and Valtteri looks down to see dark swells breaking on the rocks at the foot of the wall.

He swallows, and looks up again. “I’m not here to take advantage of you being nice,” he declares, and Daniel takes a step back.

“I didn’t say—”

“I’m being awful. Don’t—” and his eyes shut for a long moment— “don’t tell me I’m not.”

Daniel doesn’t reply, just pulls his hand back and half turns away, leaning against the stone ledge of the wall to look out at the darkening sky.

“You’re good, and happy, and I’m fucked up right now and I’m sorry about it, and I don’t know how to explain. Partly the English, partly the—the heart.” Valtteri looks at his shoes. “I’m being terrible.”

“You’re okay terrible, then.” Daniel’s shrug is easy but his voice is tight, almost wobbly. “I’ll take terrible.”

“You don’t have to. I’ll try not to be.” Valtteri doesn’t look up, but he moves to Daniel’s side and braces himself against the wall. His knuckles go white as he grips the ledge. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m not upset,” Daniel says simply.

Valtteri has no response.

“We can always have a fight later if I decide to hate it,” Daniel offers elaborately. “I can be less good, if you want.”

“Too much thinking going on,” Valtteri says finally, gesturing vaguely at his head and blinking, as if to clear the fuzz from his mind. 

“It’s okay, racing and George and—and Toto are all a world away, now,” Daniel says, cautious. “It’s fine to _not_ think about them.”

He gets a crooked smile in reply. “Not thinking about them. Just about you.”

“I’d sort of hate to hear what about _me_ is making you so upset.”

“It’s not you,” Valtteri says firmly, then smiles faintly as a realisation hits. “It’s not you, it’s me,” he declares. He folds his hands to rest them on the stone ledge, and peeks over at Daniel.

“Oh my god, are you breaking up with me?”

“Yeah, just…” Valtteri gestures between them. “You roll your sleeping bag to put it away in the morning, but I stuff mine, and I… we’re just incompatible, I think,” he finishes with a huff of finality. 

“You can’t break up with your sugar daddy, I pay you,” Daniel snorts, nudging Valtteri’s shoulder.

“I’m going to unionise,” he announces glumly. Daniel snorts again, and Valtteri laughs. “Do you think this analogy has gone too far?” 

“Are you uncomfortable with it?”

“...no.”

“Then not at all.”

Daniel inches sideways with dangerous gentleness, closer to Valtteri, who stares down at the water again. 

“You didn’t tell me what’s wrong.” His voice is close to Valtteri’s ear, just a murmur, almost drowned out in the chatter and laughs of the passing foot traffic.

“Nothing’s wrong with me if nothing’s wrong with you.”

It’s that simple—an easy, honest answer for once, and the air still feels thick but he breathes it more easily. 

“You sure?”

“Yeah. Trust me.”

“I hope I can do that.”

Valtteri turns, finds Daniel already looking at him. The glow of nearby lamps cast the softest light across them, catching in Daniel’s hair and splashing across one side of his face. He’s threateningly close and there’s a twist in Valtteri’s stomach. “You have to,” he grits out, squashing the urge to lean even closer. “You said you’d trust me and I could trust you.”

Eyelashes flutter as Daniel blinks. “You’ll prove that to me?”

“Obviously.” He doesn’t know why his voice is hushed. He doesn’t know why he watches Daniel swallow so slowly, and he pulls his mouth shut before he can say—or do—anything reckless. 

He watches Daniel try and fail to do the same. 

"You're sort of cute," Daniel whispers, staring at him seriously, his eyes bright.

"You're kind of amazing," Valtteri wants to say back, if they’re being honest. "I can't believe your tan, and you make me want to get tattoos." But he doesn't say it. So he says—

"I know."

"I'm glad I kissed you when I had the chance." The words are soft, but sure. 

Valtteri hesitates. "I think about it. Sometimes." 

"So do I."

“Should—I don’t think—should you be telling that?”

“I don’t really care.”

A shaky exhale. Valtteri’s eyes flicker to Daniel’s mouth—and instantly away again."You could... do it again."

"Could I?"

“Maybe, if you wanted.”

Daniel takes a deep breath, hovering ever closer, then steps back suddenly, inscrutable for once. The corner of his mouth barely twitches, but the crinkle of his eyes is infinitely familiar. “I’ll think on that.”

_So fucking enigmatic._

Daniel slaps him on the back, and the gentle blow snaps him back to reality. _Teammates, yeah._ That’s what was going on.

“Let’s go for a swim,” Daniel suggests, calm against the outrageous proposal. He leans over the wall and squints down at the sea, now black with the disappearance of the sunset.

“At night?”

“It’s not _that_ late, is it?”

Valtteri shows him his watch, clenching his fist against the tremble of his hand, and shrugs. “Where?” Daniel points. “If you get dragged away into the dark by a man-eating jellyfish, I might not go after you,” he declares ruefully, casting a doubtful glance at the rock beach far below, which Daniel indicates. “Let’s go.”

Daniel practically leads him on a winding chase back to the hotel, dodging not-yet-drunk tourists, and they stumble into the lobby, not out of breath but certainly disheveled, and Valtteri aims an interrupted nod of apology at the front desk before Daniel yanks him into the elevator and the doors close on their happy embarrassment. 

They’re back on the street in five minutes, after changing into swim shorts and sweaters, and throwing towels into a bag. Valtteri has no idea how Daniel suddenly knows where he’s going. But then they’re running breathlessly down stone steps on the other side of the city walls, and the sea is getting louder as Daniel sweet-talks their way through the crowded open air bars perched on the small cliffside, pulling him through waves of shitty club music. He stumbles into Daniel at the bottom of the last step. They balance on the edge of the stone outcrop lining the water’s edge as the waves break around their feet. 

“The water’s not as quiet as it looked up there.” It’s less a beach and more a collection of boulders clustered by the water, probably crowded by cliff jumpers and sunbathers during the day. But now they’re almost empty, only a few quiet voices calling back and forth.

“It’ll be okay, unless you’re tired?” Daniel slants the statement into a question.

He shakes his head. “No, it’s fine. We have sea in Finland too.”

Daniel’s already pulling off his sweatshirt. He leaves it crumped on a rock as he kneels to untie his shoes. Two months ago, Valtteri would have watched and thought nothing of it. Two days ago, Valtteri would have looked away completely. 

But after the last two hours, he watches. On purpose. He _lets himself._

Yellow-hued LPS lamps cast a warm glow across them both, and Valtteri finds his eyes tracing the astronaut tattoo again. He hates to admit he already has a favourite. It’s not like it’s _his skin._

_Jobless romantic,_ he chides himself. _That’s not_ you. _That’s some soft-brain bullshit._

He tries to bite down hard on the next thought before it emerges.

_This isn’t you, this is just—the Daniel-adjacency effect. This is just a bad day, and a touchy teammate, and your mind is running further than your body._

But then Valtteri catches a smile aimed at him. It’s not one of the gaudy, persona-creating St. Tropez Ricciardo grins, just a soft little smile—like they’re in the car and one of his favourite songs just started playing. 

It’s the roadtrip smile, as he’s come to think of it. It’s like a jolt runs through Valtteri’s mind.

_“This” isn’t just Daniel._

Whatever it is—the mood, the reluctant yet coveted glances, the silence they place meticulously between themselves—is something made by both of them. 

Valtteri tries not to think about how fucked he could be. He takes off his own sweatshirt and shoes, folding the former neatly.

Daniel leaps out into the water with a whoop, surfacing with a splutter moments later. “That’s _chilly,_ man. It’s deep, though, jump on in and daddy can catch you,” he calls. 

Valtteri aims a middle finger in Daniel’s direction before scrambling onto a higher rock and diving cleanly into the sea. It’s cool but not shockingly so, so he kicks deeper, sinking himself into the sudden silence, until he’s forced to surface.

He faintly remembers the man-eating jellyfish threat, smiling to himself, and swims out further from shore to join Daniel. The light cast from the cliffside scarcely reaches them out here, and the few other swimmers in the water are clustered near the shore. 

“Good idea to come here,” he finally concedes, treading water to remain stationary amid the surrounding swells. The sound of a man’s laugh carries across the water, and boat lights blink along the horizon out toward the sea. The city walls loom above them.

“Pretty gorgeous night,” Daniel adds, tipping his head back to watch the dim stars peeking through the thin clouds of the night sky. Valtteri tries to avert his eyes but can’t help keeping them on Daniel, watching his throat as he swallows. Before realising it, he reaches out to brush at the wet curls plastered to Daniel’s forehead, and the man turns into his glancing touch. 

They swim, losing track of time until they’re shivering, splashing and chasing each other in the dark. Daniel’s faster—blame the height advantage—but Valtteri cuts under the surface, quick and silent until he grabs Daniel round the waist from behind, and laughs in the face of Daniel’s helpless screech. 

His cry dies to a smothered burble as Valtteri dunks his head underwater, only to be dragged under with his victim. Thrashing free, he makes a break for the shore, receiving a mouthful of water for his uncontrollable giggles at Daniel’s expense. 

As he scrambles onto the rock ledge, he’s caught, Daniel grabbing his ankle and yanking him back in. He hits the water with a smack and a curse, then surfaces to see Daniel climbing out of the sea, dripping wet. Picking up his towel, Daniel wraps it around himself while Valtteri splutters, shivering and circling in the water like a small, disgruntled shark. 

“Karma, you little asshole,” Daniel calls. He’s backlit by the cliffside lights, his curls casting a halo after he runs his towel over them.

Valtteri circles back to the ledge and glowers. “Bitch.”

“You had it coming!”

“Can we get out of here? It’s late now.”

“You gonna pull me back in, man?” Daniel asks, standing well back from the ledge. 

Valtteri splashes a handful of water at him. “I think we’re even now,” he says, resting his elbows on the edge and grinning. He can look angelic when he chooses, and right now is the moment. “I won’t pull you in.”

Daniel inches closer, grabbing Valtteri’s outstretched hand and hauling him out. 

“That’s what trust looks like,” he says, serious. Water drips down his skin and he stretches ostentatiously, watching Daniel watch him. “I’ll take that,” he says suddenly, grabbing Daniel’s towel and stepping around him as if in search of his own. 

_That’s right, I can be nice. I can be_ good. 

With a placid but confused sound, Daniel turns to Valtteri.

_Not that good, though._

He instantly throws his weight sideways into the bewildered man, knocking him off balance, then adds an extra shove to topple him into the deep. “Trust me,” he announces, as Daniel hits the water with an aborted bellow of rage.

Valtteri watches, folding the towel neatly and setting it on a nearby rock. He stands at the ledge and looks down at his surfacing victim. “What’s wrong?” he asks, his face all innocence. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t _push.”_

* * *

Valtteri sleeps well that night, happy to crash in bed after being strung-out all day. He cradles himself in the thick blankets, reveling in the particular brand of commercial comfort found in a summer hotel with the air conditioning on high. The tent they’ve slept in so far is fine, he likes tents just fine—but nothing feels like a bed. 

Surprisingly, the only time he really misses his phone so far is while lying in bed, waiting for sleep. But it barely matters: without the distraction of a tantalisingly scrollable algorithm, he knocks out almost instantly, despite muffled noises of Daniel showering, and the lights left on in the room. 

Daniel must sleep poorly. Valtteri is roused by a soft touch on his arm while the room is still dark. He squints at the clock— _ouch, not reading that_ —and rolls over to face the terribly familiar shape of Daniel in the darkness.

“Hey, VB—Valtteri,” comes the unhappy whisper. “Can’t sleep. I… do you…” 

“Get in, knock yourself out,” Valtteri mutters blearily, rolling over to the other side of the bed and pulling his blankets closer. He’s asleep again by the time Daniel’s joined him. 

In the morning, he nudges Daniel awake, finding the man wrapped in his own blankets, just like their sleeping bags in the tent. It’s comfortingly distant yet familiar, and Valtteri speaks after a contented silence.

“What was up last night?” If he doesn’t ask now, he tells himself, Daniel will talk about it later. And that will be out of hand.

Daniel shrugs, still burrowed in his duvet, only his messy bed hair and sleepy eyes visible from across the pillows. “Dunno. Maybe I just missed you.” He yawns. “Maybe it’s impossible for me to sleep more than two feet away from you, which is pretty fuckin’ romantic if I say so myself, but that’s going to be inconvenient when this is over.”

Valtteri groans. He loves and hates the sparkle in Daniel’s eye. “You can buy a body pillow if it’s that bad.”

“A Bottas pillow.”

“Yeah. No.”

_“Huh.”_

“Shut up.”

* * *

The morning is good; Valtteri steals Daniel’s phone to search out the best coffee in the city, and they walk there in the fresh air of a cool morning. The cafe they discover is well-worn and it smells just right, so they sit in the young sunlight on the patio. Daniel scrolls through twitter, and Valtteri uses the silence to trace their route for the next two days, which should take them to Istanbul. He circles tentative border crossing routes, and outlines a possible three-day plan. The calculations will be mostly nil, he knows, but they have people to meet in Turkey, and they don't want to be the annoying ones who are late. 

“You ready to go?” he asks suddenly, capping his pen.

Daniel looks up eagerly. “We can go?”

“We can go.”

 _“Hell_ yeah, let’s go.”

Arto Kämänen’s almost packed, so back at the hotel they check out and throw the last few bags into the backseat. Daniel takes the wheel, Valtteri hands him his sunglasses, and they’re off to Montenegro.

Daniel takes it easy on the car and they camp overnight on a rock beach in Greece, after four border crossings, two instances of getting lost, and a brisk yet totally uninformed argument about whether Kosovo should count as its own country. 

They sleep restlessly in the stiflingly hot weather, and the next day takes them across the Greece-Turkey border, ever closer to Asia. 

“We’re one week down, VB, congrats,” Daniel reminds him. “Shit, we’re meeting people soon. Ready to convoy up?”

“It was… who? The vloggers.” Valtteri squints at the rearview mirror, cursing the sunset glaring back at him as they begin to navigate the outskirts of Istanbul’s urban density. 

“Elli. And Clara,” Daniel notes, checking his phone and the handful of messages he’s exchanged with the woman they met back at the starting line in Prague. “And you know the kids with the guitar? Elli said they’re in the gang. Plus a couple more we’ll meet later.”

“Feels way longer than a week since Prague, actually.”

“Mongol Rally time, man. It’s not real.”

“I guess.” Valtteri doesn’t say that he’s not looking forward to joining others—though it feels longer than a week, he still barely feels like he’s grasping _Daniel._ Let alone a horde of strangers. 

“Don’t worry about it too much, okay?” 

Valtteri winces, as Daniel seemingly reads his mind. He doesn’t reply.

“They’ll be cool. You’ll get a break from me, and maybe their food will be better.”

That’s enough to break him into a quiet laugh. “Arto’s sticking with me, so if I want to get a break from you I’ll be kicking _you_ out to someone else’s shitbox.”

Daniel drums his fingers on his leg. “If anyone decides to recognise us, don’t worry. I’ll defend you.”

So far, Valtteri’s surreptitious googling of their names hasn’t come up with anything about the rally, to his relief. _Maybe it can stay that way?_ He smiles, glancing at Daniel. “That’s… gallant of you. But sure. Here comes the public.”

It’s a milestone; the rest of the world suddenly exists again. The Daniel-and-Valtteri bubble is about to burst, for better or for worse.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [VB’s TRAVEL LOG]  
> \- dan actually rolls sleeping bag. terrible and bad?  
> \- low on film  
> \- how to dry towels in car???


	6. thanks for the kiss

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> back at it again with another chapter! meet **the convoy.**
> 
> thanks all for waiting, it's only been a month this time, so let's call that a _marked_ improvement. your comments are so appreciated and I've been loving the conversations I've had with so many of you. thank you for reading <3
> 
> this chapter unofficially sponsored by the song No More Hesitation by Sorrow and Cyn.

[DR3 + VB77’s Mongol Rally ‘22 album]

[there’s another parking ticket glued to this page. below it is a photo of arto kämänen in istanbul. valtteri sitting on the ledge of the open trunk, grinning at three kittens in his arms, another perching on his shoulder and one more climbing his track pants. opposite, a photo of daniel and four college-age boys, all five wearing matching pink bandanas and leaning over the open hood of a run-down van on a roadside.]

* * *

It's like he’s on trial, if a trial can take place at midafternoon in an Istanbul bar. And if only half of his jury knew what the hell was going on, or who he is, or that he even feels their scrutiny.

Valtteri's sitting on the edge of his seat, bouncing his leg while a beer sweats all over his hand and Daniel Fucking Ricciardo is verbally making love to the newfound group so far known ominously only as _the convoy._ Well, here they are, and for a man who’s made his millions by driving alone at 300 kilometres per hour, Valtteri feels far too intimidated by the concept of driving at 80 klicks with a crowd.

Anyway, they love Daniel.

No one can help loving Daniel.

_Shit._

So there’s Elli, from the campfire in Prague, and her partner and teammate Clara. Valtteri had spotted their battered Skoda plastered with sponsors— _real_ sponsors, like Garmin, and Nalgene. 

(He’d nudged Daniel when they first saw the car in the crammed city parking lot, where they’d met their new caravan. “Looks like we could have stepped up our game,” he mouthed almost silently.

“Oh, but we’re Red Bull athletes.”

“I forgot that bit.” He patted the Lada’s roof. “Love you the most."

“Thank you?”

“Not you. Arto.”)

So there’s Elli, and Clara, and also at the near end of the table of twelve—or so—is a familiar gaggle of four Americans, last seen fireside in Prague. 

Daniel already knows them by name, but Valtteri hasn’t bet any money on telling their names apart by the time he reaches Mongolia.

“I’ve got one roll in my beanie for each girl who ghosted me when I told them I was going on the rally,” River-or-Ryan-or-Henry brags. 

“Which is so _wack,”_ another interjects, punctuating with a slap on the tabletop. “I’ve deleted Snap but you’re still posting a dozen IG stories a day, bro.” That’s—Ryan, or Grayson, maybe even River. 

Fuck if Valtteri knows.

Valtteri doesn’t know a thing. He just watches, watches Daniel make eye contact and absorb smiles and fill the room with the _big_ laugh he hasn’t done in the weeks of hanging out with only Valtteri. And Valtteri feels a damning pang of loneliness. 

It’s the 2010s all over again. It’s every bashful year of his life, back like a 4D movie with accurate details right down to the sweat on his hands. Without a reputation to precede him, he’s tragically awkward again. He’s still agonisingly close to the shyness that defined him for too long, the awkwardness only shaken off so recently. Everyone knew how to handle a driver in their natural habitat, where he was Valtteri Bottas, yeah, but more importantly a _driver—_ and a Finnish one at that—which meant he was treated with all the personality of an instruction manual. Most crucially, he was given another on how to behave—what to say, when to be funny, what to pretend to care about, and how to grow just enough of a media personality to trick people into thinking he could be the real deal. (He was never the real deal.) 

But suddenly there’s no precedent—there’s no _average profile of a Mongol Rally driver._ Hell, the whole scene might as well be a quirkiness competition. Which he’s going to lose with a resounding deficit: he’s only Valtteri, with a name no one can pronounce, in Istanbul, with a shitty car and a shiny new teammate to make him look shy and awkward again. 

_For fuck’s sake, I’m not still 25._

But it feels like it. A prickle of miserably familiar teenage dread eats at his stomach, his mouth suddenly empty of all the words he knows he should be saying if he only knew what they were.

But they love Daniel.

“What’s your ride, anyway?” Daniel asks the boys easily, jerking his chin up lightly in that universal bro code of acknowledgement to a fellow bro whose acquaintance one has already made.

Grayson, or Ryan, natters on about the woefully underpowered van which the team—formally known as team _West Coast Blessed Coast_ —have managed to drag from England already. But, and it barely needs to be said, all four of them are from California and white as Wonderbread. 

“Anything wrong with the van, or it's just Mongol Rally spec?” Valtteri ventures casually.

“Fuck if I know, man.” Ryan, or River, acknowledges Valtteri’s entrance to the conversation with an elaborate shrug. “This girl in Budapest gave it a look because she sounded like shit—the van, not the girl—but we didn’t find anything.”

Daniel volunteers, “We’ll take a peek later if you want.”

“Oh, you two know cars?” River, or Grayson, perks up.

Valtteri chokes on his drink and collapses into the greasy tabletop.

Daniel thumps him on the back until he can breathe, and Valtteri straightens up in time to see Clara shoot a _look_ at him. It’s too significant to be nothing, but he turns away fast.

Daniel just leans back in his chair and grins. “Yeah, he studied mechanics in high school.”

“I know cars,” Valtteri wheezes. He side-eyes Daniel. “Just a little. I wanted to be a mechanic once.”

“I wanted to be a lawyer once,” one California boy offers earnestly, “then mom said one in the family is enough already, so I’m leaving that to my dad.”

The banter sweeps around the table again. At the far end of the group are a couple of other teams, just distant enough in the noisy establishment that Valtteri can’t make contact other than an obligatory nod and wave. He settles back in his chair, struggling to follow the story Elli’s telling about the creepy hotel she and Clara had stayed at in Romania.

 _They look comfortable together,_ he realises, jarring himself with the thought. _Of course they do. They look like… like no matter where they’d be, whether in a grimy nook of Istanbul or not, that they’d sort of belong there._

Then Valtteri thinks, _what the fuck was that?_

It’s something about their ease, the way the air shapes itself around them. Valtteri feels like he’s carved his way to get here, splintering the atmosphere by force because it won’t fold him in its arms. It sparks something like jealousy in him, because he hasn’t felt at home for… fuck knows. If home isn’t Monaco then it should be Finland, but Finland has felt pretty damn bad the last time he was there. An ungracious host to his uninvited misery. He should feel at home on the move, which is where he’s spent the last decade. But though you can find comfort in the predictability of airplanes and hotels, they don’t compel you to root. And if he felt welcomed by _familiarity_ in the paddock, he certainly didn’t feel an ease of belonging. 

Maybe the more you _tell_ yourself that somewhere is a place to stay, the more jagged the integration is. He turns the half-formed thought in his mind, unhappy.

But looking at Elli and Clara is enough to make a man blink at the remembrance of those rusty “home is a person” bromides. He watches as Clara leans over to whisper into Elli’s ear, her indigo-dyed hair falling over her shoulder before she pushes it back. Elli breaks into a quiet laugh as she listens, and she quickly squeezes her girlfriend’s hand, which gleams dully with multiple silver rings. It’s a brief movement, a poised comfort. 

He bites the inside of his cheek and stares down at his own hands, clenched around his glass. 

When a question aimed is in their direction, he looks up but only catches the tail end of the query. 

“—your worst moment so far?”

Valtteri starts, and watches Daniel swallow, pressing his lips into a thin line, though he cracks an overly-large grin when Elli raises her eyebrows at him. 

“No bad moments here,” Daniel drawls, scraping braggadocio into the cracks opened by the question like so much salve into a wound. "Blue sky and open highways all the way. Except for the time I asked for lemonade in that cafe in Austria and they gave me Sprite." He wrinkles his nose.

River, or Henry, laughs explosively. “Fuck, man, you should hear what happened to _us._ Things have been chill but we were in Romania too—”

“Shit, I almost forgot!” someone, probably Grayson, interjects.

Valtteri feels Daniel surreptitiously bump his knee with his own. He nudges Daniel back, a wordless thanks for the rescue, but doesn’t turn to watch the smile that his touch elicits. 

The boy who’s either River or Henry waves his friend into silence and continues. “—we camped in Romania one night and there are like, hella bears in Romania, apparently, but we didn’t know that. So Gray and Ry are sleeping in the van this night and River ‘n I—”

 _Must be Henry._ He’s got a tattoo on his right arm, one of those geometric line designs every basic bitch was getting back in 2019, and Valtteri stores the knowledge with a dash of smugness. That one’s Henry.

“—we’ve got tent duty. So it’s literally midnight, we’re passed the fuck out, but Winnie over here’s nocturnal or something, and River wakes me up screaming bloody murder because a bear’s walked in the side of the tent. After ripping it open. So he grabs my backpack and sprints off—”

“Fuck, can those guys run—”

“—and I’ve just about crapped my pants. Which sucks, because like, not only was that bag genuine Patagucci, but some Smokey Bear in Romania’s got every single pair of my Calvins.”

The group roars at that, and from the far end of the table someone leans forward to call, _“I get burgled by wildlife in my Calvins,”_ and from that moment they’re all hopeless.

* * *

They decide to leave the city that evening, to avoid congested traffic the next morning as they start their trek through Turkey. Daniel insists on a new post-it for Arto once they cross the Bosporus and leave Europe for Asia. 

“Baby’s first intercontinental travel,” he gloats, smoothing down the sticky note with care.

Valtteri casts a look at him. Daniel looks way too grubby to be this glowing, desperately in need of a shave, and Valtteri doesn’t even want to think about what smells are masked by the overwhelming fragrance of Fiji Sea Breeze deodorant. 

But— “You look happy,” Daniel says suddenly, and Valtteri hadn’t even known he was being watched too. “You look like today’s been good to you.”

Traffic is slow in the centre of Istanbul, but the only response Valtteri can gather in the pauses of stop-and-go is, “Do I?”

“It’s the tan you’re picking up. Brings out your eyes.”

Valtteri flushes. “I guess I might be happy. Nothing’s as shit as it could be.”

“It’s okay,” Daniel adds. “You look good pink, too.”

* * *

It’s déjà vu. He’s sitting by a fire, open sky overhead, Daniel across the circle of companions holding a requisitioned guitar, and Elli’s at his shoulder with a mouthful of things to say. The difference is now he’s an hour south of Istanbul, on the rooftop patio of a modest local hotel, and he’s nursing an apple juice box instead of a beer.

“Valtteri! You little phony!” Clara claps him on the shoulder and falls into the empty patio chair Daniel’s vacated on his other side. “What are you doing, lying to the kids?”

For the second time today, Valtteri chokes.

Elli leans forward. “You’re a pretty quiet one, V. Anything you want to tell us now, rather than later?”

“Is this an interrogation? Shouldn’t you be aiming the camera at something right now?” he asks. 

“Actually, we just thought it would be better to let you know _now_ that we already know who you are.”

 _Oh, Christ._ But there’s no anxiety twisting in his gut, oddly. He must be losing his edge.

“Who’s ‘we?’” Valtteri demands, nonetheless. He’d rather talk to Daniel before doing damage control, and let him live up to yesterday’s promise. But Daniel’s not catching any eye contact right now.

“The grand council of the convoy. Team Westward Hoes, which is a pretty terrible name for the Mongol Rally, if you think about it. Elli, and Clara. Just us two.”

He aims a crooked smile at the ground in front of him, in spite of himself. They’re a decent pair so far, not running roughshod over anyone’s privacy yet. Though, it’s only been a half day, and Valtteri’s spent a lifetime not letting his guard down. It would be stupid to relax yet. “Alright, who are we then?” he asks warily.

“Someone whose secrets we’re going to keep, because if you’re lying to the kids then you must have a good reason to do that.”

It’s a weak moment of daring, given his usual levels of risk-taking behaviour, but he says, “I’m really not anyone right now. It’s a pretty huge change. I’m Daniel’s teammate, I guess.”

“Daniel’s his own case,” Clara mutters offhandedly. Then louder, “I’m not worried much about Danny boy, not yet.”

“The fuck’s that mean?” Valtteri asks mildly, leaning back in his chair. _What are they seeing about Daniel already, that he hasn’t yet?_

Neither of them answer him, and Elli takes a long, noisy sip of the dregs from her own juice box, then tosses the empty into the firepit. All three of them watch as it inflates in the heat, then explodes with a dull pop. Across the fire, Daniel picks the first notes to a song Valtteri doesn’t know.

“Don’t be too hard on yourself,” Elli says finally. She raises both hands in a half shrug, but her expression is inscrutable. “I can’t presume to know exactly what you’re feeling, but shit certainly happens.”

He’s silent for a moment longer, then opens his mouth, biting his tongue against the words he really wants to say. “Why’d you two decide on doing the rally?” he asks instead.

“Why did _you?”_ Elli throws the question back.

“I asked first, you know?”

“Ah, well, that’s only fair.” She pushes her glasses up her nose where they’ve slipped down, and stretches her legs toward the fire. “You’ve heard every adventure blogger story, these couples who hate their desk jobs and their spouses and their lives and then suddenly inherit some cash and buy a van, so they can hate their lives only sporadically, and in more instagrammable locations.”

Valtteri grins.

“I can’t claim to be in the business with any grand delusions of ethics, but it pays the bills, I sleep well on planes, and we’re away from home enough that we can indefinitely procrastinate moving a couch into our flat.

“I was a youtuber, honestly,” she confesses. She runs a hand through her cropped hair. “Started in secondary school, and it just inflated until about four, five years ago. Some, ah, shit happened very publicly—” she meets Valtteri’s side eye with her own— “and I couldn’t do it anymore, had to move. Changed my name. I bounced around some desk jobs then ended up in media, where I met Clara.”

“It took way too long for us to realise that we both traveled too much to make it work, so we both quit to travel together instead,” Clara sums up, “and we may as well not waste the video editing expertise.”

“That’s more than what the bio on the website says, but since I found out your life story with one Google search, it’s probably only fair to give you the bonus content,” Elli says earnestly, laughing when Valtteri scowls at her. She sobers, but doesn’t shrink. “God, I’m so sorry. Like, actually.”

“It’s okay.” It actually is. Everyone’s either handled him with gloves or turned away completely, so he’s surprised to find it doesn’t hurt when someone pokes the messy wound. He rubs his face—maybe it’s time to shave again soon. “I don’t have much to say about it, so just don’t expect a new Kalevala from me about it.”

“If you don’t want to be Valtteri Bottas right now, you don’t have to be, and it’s not our business.”

“I’ll let you know if I find out who I am instead, okay?” He’s not too surprised to find out he means it. For the half day alone he’s known them, it feels good to hand off a little responsibility for the venture, though he’s shouldering a fraction of everyone else’s as well. He and Daniel could do a worse job at finding travel buddies. A friend met on the road is a friend you’ll no doubt part from at the end of it, so— 

Yeah, maybe he’s losing all his edge at once. 

* * *

[DR3 + VB77’s Mongol Rally ‘22 album]

[tucked into this page is a handmade bracelet woven with the words “california republic.” there’s a photo of valtteri and clara sitting half-submerged in a stream at the base of a rock scree, wearing sunglasses with their swimsuits and washing clothes by hand. the photo is overexposed and too bright from glare off the water. on the opposite page, a top-down perspective photo of daniel’s head and shoulders peeking out from underneath arto kämänen as he lies on the ground. he’s sticking his tongue out, and there’s a smudge of grease on his cheek.]

* * *

Driving through Turkey is such a relief, so _easy_ it’s almost embarrassing to admit. Maybe, Valtteri thinks, what he needed was a break from his focus, after all. 

Everything in moderation, so they say. If Daniel knew him too well, the gang not knowing him at all creates a balance more comfortable than having been seen 24/7 by one single travel companion. He places himself into the equation with care, because like all balances, it can be upset.

He feels like he should have known this before, he tells himself he did—grand prix travel skims so quickly over the surface of reality, never actually meeting it. The F1 season is all cities that leave him with no taste in his mouth, beach trail after mountain hike that look exactly like every other destination he’s been to. The biome of a traveling athlete, he supposes. Unofficially, perhaps unknowingly, curated into mundanity. 

Cliché be damned, it feels a lifetime away from where he is right now. Right now is so stunningly _real:_ every hard bump in the rocky sideroads that they wander down “just to explore,” the waterfall streams they stick their feet into, the locals who wave them down sometimes just to say hello. 

They’re kind. They’re nice. Everyone they travel with is so _nice._ There’s a team of twins with their retirement-age father and his brother, and a gang of university students in a banged-up SEAT with a rubber ducky glued to the hood. 

What’s more, their kindness sounds honest. 

Valtteri’s never felt so dizzied yet so grounded.

He sinks into the landscape. Though he stays zipped in his tent at night, or wrapped between hotel sheets, he feels like if he ran outside into the darkness and tucked himself into the rocky little crags of Cappadocia, he’d fit there better than he wants to think about. It’s an itchy, tempting thought. He puts it away and stays in bed every night, listening to Daniel’s soft breathing.

He keeps his eyes wide open, seeing everything new and waking up every morning less exhausted than he expects. It’s good to be around other people again, better than he thought it would be. It’s easier to smile and laugh than he remembered, and though he may be lost without being Valtteri Bottas, Number 77, sometimes he can almost admit the anonymity is a weight off his shoulders. And if he feels untethered, a little jagged, then he’s no different from anyone else on the rally. 

Valtteri talks to Daniel less, and watches him more. He sees more in the muteness than he supposed. 

A pang of guilt accompanies the realisation that it takes Daniel’s boisterous taunting of everyone _else_ for Valtteri realise how gently _he’s_ been treated. 

They keep checking into hotel rooms with two beds, then sharing one. Each wrapped in their own blankets, they don’t talk about it. They don’t touch, either. 

The daytime makes up for it, though, when they become clumsy magnets bouncing off of and bumping against each other—whole conversations carried with no words, but through the brush of fingertips as they share a can of Red Bull, or needless hands extended to each other, which are grasped anyway, doing more to throw them off balance than to create it.

Daniel gently shakes him awake one morning. Cracking an eye open, Valtteri takes in the dim light in the sparsely-furnished hotel room, and rolls over to press his face back into his thin pillow.

 _“No,”_ he mutters, muffled. 

_“Yes,”_ Daniel insists, untucking the blankets from around Valtteri. “There’s a surprise, but you have to come now.”

“Mm.” His neck aches, but the uncomfortable bed is still preferable to getting up. 

“Please, man. Before it’s too light, seriously.” Daniel moves to their backpacks and starts pulling out shirts, throwing them onto the bed.

“Fuck off,” Valtteri replies perfunctorily, but he’s sitting up. “These are both yours,” he says, voice raspy from sleep as he shakes out the shirts. 

“Nevermind, just get one on and get your camera,” Daniel says, grabbing one and yanking it on. The other is a faded blue tie-dye, and Valtteri pulls it on carefully, not bothering to change the sweatpants he’s slept in. 

Coolness clings to the stone of the ancient hotel, and their shoes whisper along the tiles in the corridor as they leave the room at pre-dawn. Daniel hands Valtteri a granola bar, and the wrapper crackles as he breaks it in half and hands a piece back to Daniel.

“Thanks. I have more snacks for later,” Daniel says around the mouthful of food, then they step outside. The last wisps of night air are evaporating as light creeps across one edge of the horizon, and Valtteri looks to Daniel for his cue. “The car,” Daniel says with a jerk of his head, and they take off for the secluded parking lot. 

Valtteri catches his reflection in the window glass as he opens the passenger-side door—lit by the harsh white lights in the hotel parking lot, there’s still sleep written all over his face, and his borrowed shirt hangs off of his shoulders to make him look almost frighteningly small. It’s a throwback to being a kid on a late drive home from somewhere he didn’t particularly care about—the familiar blend of comfort and exhaustion settles warmly in his chest. He blinks at his mirrored self but shuts the car door silently after climbing in, and then yawns.

Daniel yawns too, then laughs quietly. “Don’t give that to me,” he scolds, starting the car and pulling out onto the roadway.

“Can you tell me what’s happening yet?” Valtteri asks, cradling his camera bag in his lap. He leans against the cool glass of the window, Daniel seems to know which way they’re going, and Arto Kämänen has the grace to run quietly along the winding roads as they climb into the hills surrounding the valley carved into the uncommon landscape. 

“It’s almost sunrise, the sky’s clear, and we’re in Cappadocia.” Daniel pronounces it _ka-pa-doe-cha,_ and Valtteri turns the word over in his mind. It has an awkward weight to it.

Valtteri pronounces it _ka-pa-doe-kee-ah,_ and tells Daniel so, forcefully. 

“Okie dokie, _Cappadocia._ Anyway, that’s not the part you were supposed to focus on. You have to _guess_ what's going on."

"I was hauled out of bed in the dark and told to get dressed and get in a car, so this might as well be a kidnapping for all I know." 

“And they’d never suspect me,” Daniel muses, grinning. “They’d think we were _both_ kidnapped.”

“So where’s your hideout?”

“Sorry to break it to you, but,” he glances over at Valtteri, “we’re just going to watch the sunrise.”

Valtteri has no rebuttal to that, and just rolls down the window to let the cool air wake him up. An almost unearthly landscape spreads itself below them, rock plateaus striped with many hues seeming to rise out of more craggy stone formations.

Valtteri really hates how Daniel suddenly has a sense of direction when they’re doing something spontaneous. 

Daniel parks them at the top of one of the plateaus, pulling off the road and jumping out of the car. With Valtteri clambering after him, they trail offroad before Daniel stops near the edge, spreading out a blanket to sit on. They settle there, sitting cross-legged as they take in the view over the valley. The sky is markedly lighter, bluer than grey, shades of pink and purple climbing the horizon, as overhead, the last of the stars are fading. The shadowy forms of the rock formations dominate the valley, before the day’s light emerges to claim them.

“You never run out of new things to see,” Valtteri says suddenly, surprising himself.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean—we’ve spent most of our lives traveling but this—” he gestures broadly at the view— “we’ll never run out of this. Always more places to be.”

“And you’ve barely even been in Australia,” Daniel points out.

“As if you’ve been to Finland much?”

"Ah." Daniel waves a hand. "Small country, can't be much to see there anyway."

"Are you dumb?" Valtteri retorts.

"Is that your argument?"

"I actually don't need an answer."

Declining to reply, Daniel grabs the strap of the camera bag and drags it out of Valtteri’s lap, ignoring the sour look aimed at him. He opens the bag with a delicious _rip_ of velcro and extracts the camera from the cushioning with a deft wiggle of his grip.

“Oh, shit, forgot I couldn’t look through your old photos,” Daniel laughs, turning the camera over in his hands. “This thing is a dinosaur.”

“You’re going to fucking drop it!” Valtteri snaps, scrambling over to loop the camera strap around Daniel’s neck. “Hold it right or give it back, dumbass,” he huffs without conviction, retreating to himself again, but Daniel bumps him with an elbow. 

“First you wind the film,” Daniel declares gleefully. “I know this part.” 

Valtteri just watches, hugging his knees to his chest. A golden tint starts to wash the landscape as the first glimmer of sunlight cracks the space between land and sky. 

Daniel aims the lens at a rock formation that looks spectacularly like a cluster of giant dicks pointed skyward, and after a useless moment of fiddling with the focus, the shutter goes _click._

“Just took a great photo of you, man,” Daniel announces. 

“You have the wrong settings for the lighting,” Valtteri says, ignoring the jab. He reaches for the camera. “I’ll change to program mode for—”

Daniel leans away, hugging the camera to his chest. “I don’t want the training wheels,” he says, “I’m waiting for the lesson you promised.”

“I didn’t promise!”

“Show me,” Daniel demands, handing back the camera but leaving the safety strap looped around his neck. He leans in, leashed as Valtteri grabs the camera and adjusts the settings.

He hands it back, crowding Daniel’s shoulder as he leans in with instructions. “Because you won’t shut up,” he concedes, acutely aware he’s _much_ closer to Daniel than he needs to be. The edge of coolness in the air has faded, sapped by the day’s light. He suddenly notices the warmth between them, and against both his judgement and control, he flushes. “Now wind the film again,” he instructs. 

Daniel obeys, then raises the viewfinder to his eye—

“—but don’t hold like that, no—” Valtteri fusses, moving to crouch behind Daniel, where he still sits like an eager kindergartener during circle time. He instinctively grabs the camera and Daniel’s right hand, fitting the the latter around the former and adjusting his grip. “Here—” _fuck it,_ he thinks, and wraps an arm around Daniel to grab his left hand, “you need to hold it like this to make the focus easier to adjust,” he manages to explain. Daniel tips his head back to bump Valtteri’s shoulder. _He’s so warm, probably absorbing the sun,_ Valtteri thinks. _Pulling it up to rise over the land just by being here._

“See that?” Daniel suddenly asks, hushed. He points.

Valtteri squints, following the line of Daniel’s gesture until his eyes widen. On the horizon, a single hot-air balloon rises, outlined against the horizon.

“Oh—” he exclaims, freezing for a moment. “Yeah,” he says in a tiny voice. 

“Yeah?” Daniel echoes. 

“The balloons,” he says, suddenly feeling silly. “I forgot them.” Now he’s looking, and they’re everywhere dotting the landscape in front of them, utterly silent as they inflate interminably slowly on the ground. As they watch, one, then two more noiselessly rise into the morning air.

“I was just hoping the weather’d stay good,” Daniel says, suddenly hesitant in his admission. “Didn’t want to promise them, then drag you outside at the asscrack of dawn if they might not happen.”

“You didn’t forget,” Valtteri says simply. His gratefulness is clunky when articulated, so he keeps his mouth shut, just bumps his shoulder against Daniel’s. 

He lets Daniel hold the camera, and when the photos are developed weeks later, they all turn out bad—a few blurry ones, hazy glowing gas flames inflating balloons to release them from their slumber in the fields, oddly-exposed landscape shots of balloons as silhouettes only against a colour-streaked sunrise, a well-focused but badly framed shot of a man waving at them from a rainbow balloon directly overhead. Valtteri remembers Daniel lying on his back for that shot, waving back, then tugging Valtteri down to sprawl beside him and watch the breezes paint the sky.

There are dozens, more than Valtteri could even think to count. They move effortlessly, like a time-lapse, with no predictability but every dignity. He can’t think of anything to say, wrapped in his tiredness and then baptised into a daylight he never expected.

They stay there until the sun breaks free of the horizon, and the balloons are sinking back towards it. Something in Valtteri’s chest feels unmoored, lightheadedness but make it phrenic, floating dizzily in a part of his heart he can’t reach. He hopes it comes back to ground soon, too. Or maybe it won’t, and in his head he’ll stay hovering.

Daniel turns on the radio for the short drive back, and the CD player picks up at Digital Love. He feels Daniel’s glance, a warm touch in its own right, and dares to glance back.

* * *

Photography lesson number two is less disingenuous, assuming Daniel’s intent had originally been to flirt outrageously. Which seems to be the purpose of this session.

They’re perched on the hood of Arto Kämänen the next evening, parked at their new campsite with the convoy, and the camera is in Daniel’s hands though he does more gesturing with it than photography. 

There’s scant privacy but everyone else seems busy elsewhere. Valtteri’s not listening to Daniel though, not really, just trying to keep his focus off the way he keeps managing to casually touch Valtteri’s thigh. He’s murmuring instinctive replies to Daniel’s monologue of a conversation, until Daniel turns toward him and grabs his hand. Valtteri looks, startled. 

“You should put this away, VB,” he says purposefully, handing over the camera. 

The camera bag is behind them, and Valtteri packs it up before turning back to Daniel again. “What’s up now?”

Daniel’s silent for a moment, presses his lips together. His voice is hushed when he announces, “I’m going to kiss you.”

_Now?_

It seems like _now._

“If that’s okay.”

Valtteri should ask _why,_ but he doesn’t, doesn’t say anything.

He nods numbly, and Daniel leans in—and that’s how it feels when their lips meet: numb. There’s a hand round the back of his neck, Daniel’s fingers are firm, but the touch of skin on skin is as dry as if he’s holding his own hand—physical, not hot but automated. _Brain’s too sluggish to keep up right now,_ he tells himself. He tells himself he should close his eyes, and waits for the warmth of the full-body flush that’s supposed to accompany a milestone of a kiss, but it doesn’t come. It feels like… nothing. Daniel’s beard scrapes his chin, and it’s reassuringly mechanical.

Maybe he doesn’t care too much after all. He pulls back and feels Daniel’s hand slip off his neck, then watches his missing blush mount the other man’s cheeks. 

“Ah—” Daniel starts, then closes his mouth. He’s realising he’s too old to ask _how was that,_ Valtteri can tell, and the hilarity of the notion forces him to bite down hard on a smile that would have been inappropriate. 

“Thanks for the kiss,” Valtteri says seriously, before he can ask why, before Daniel can decide to try again. There’s a big question in his wide brown eyes, and— 

A footstep crunches in the dry grass and Valtteri whips around, his stomach twisting. But he breathes easier when he sees it’s only Elli, emerging from behind the Skoda with her hands full of gear. She pointedly shrugs one shoulder at the two of them. “Is this… a thing?” she calls, a smothered grin on her face.

 _What did you see?_ he’s dying to ask. He doesn’t ask.

Daniel scoots closer to Valtteri, shedding all solemnity like an over-warm sweater. Wrapping both arms around him, he fakes a glower. “This is absolutely not a thing,” he says smugly, squeezing Valtteri close until Valtteri’s face is buried against Daniel’s neck. He plants a kiss on the crown of Valtteri’s head.

Crushed against his skin, Daniel smells like insect repellent mellowed out by wood smoke and car exhaust, and so faintly of the lemon detergent from their last laundry day. It wrings Valtteri’s heart in his chest. It feels like all the emotions which were missing from the kiss, tingling in his fingertips with a rush of incriminating heat. The wave of simple comfort is so closely followed on its heels by a nauseating fear that the sensations ball up into guilt, the kind that burns indigestibly in his stomach and tastes bitter in his throat.

He grabs Daniel’s wrist, pulling it away from his shoulders to extract himself, his heart thudding. 

The words come from his mouth involuntarily. “No, wait, this is a thing,” he retorts. _God damn his need to be contrary,_ but he supposed he must commit to his bit now. “This is absolutely a thing,” he announces, quite loudly for a man fighting to escape the embrace of the one he shares the purported _thing_ with. 

If he dares to look at Elli, he’ll see her laughing, but he doesn’t need to look when he can _hear_ it. 

He takes both Daniel’s hands in his own, neatly folding them in each other and wrapping his own around them. If he holds on tight, it nearly hides the tremble of his own hands.

Daniel lets him arrange their hands, watching with—what Valtteri thinks is—undue fondness. “Wait, this is a thing?” he stage-whispers. “We’ve got something?”

“We’ve got our piece of shit wreck of a Lada,” Valtteri says smugly, lacing his fingers through Daniel’s. “We stay together for Arto Kämänen.”

“Not to intrude on the _moment,_ but that sounds serious enough to me.” She wanders off, gear rattling in her arms.

“Good luck for me,” Daniel replies in a real whisper this time, leaning in to bump his forehead softly against Valtteri’s. 

“That was a terrible kiss,” Valtteri whispers back after a moment.

Daniel pulls back. “Then it wasn’t just me? Christ, I thought I got out of practice.”

“You were definitely better at it last time,” Valtteri nods, just to watch Daniel blush.

He does. 

Valtteri does, too.

“Should we try again?”

He casts a look around. No one’s in sight, but it might not stay that way. “No. But later, yeah,” Valtteri says. 

That’s a terrible decision. 

Every look, every casual brush of hands, every cheeky fawning backhanded compliment passed between them is tearing up the stoicism of the teammate relationship. Like a solid piece of firewood, chopped first into splintering, painful kindling and then whittled to shavings so ephemeral that any spark would set it crackling. 

The obvious _safe_ route would be clamping down on the tinder for emotions, not getting caught kissing his teammate and already planning to resume it later. 

Maybe tonight. (Sounds fun.)

 _If you’re so committed to safety, why did you sign up to be_ literally _close to him for two months?_ a tiny voice in his mind says. 

_Because I do what I want,_ he retorts, wrinkling his nose at his own thoughts. _Besides._

 _He’s hot_.

His head jerks up as he looks at Daniel, surprised at his own mental admission. He’s sort of disgusting, especially now, in a very grubby, organic, dirt-smudged and dust-stained way. But he’s still hot. _(For god’s sake, you can say it, you fucked once already.)_ And he’s apparently available, because he’s halfway to Mongolia right now, and he seems to like Valtteri for some dumb fucking reason.

Daniel watches him with a dumb fucking smile.

 _Disgusting,_ Valtteri tells himself. He grins back—he can’t help it.

Damn opposites attracting. 

When wood tinder catches flame, it’s easier to kill than to encourage; even breathing on it the wrong way will put out the tiny glow of what could have been. 

It’s not that serious.

Valtteri exhales, letting go of Daniel’s hands. He can stop this whenever he wants.

* * *

They camp in the shadow of some rocky hills that night, hidden from the roadways.

If he didn’t know better, he’d think Daniel was avoiding him. First he’s volunteering to fetch wash water for the other teams, then he’s bossing around Grayson as the California lads try to cook dinner. He’s everywhere but with Valtteri, just when Valtteri’s feeling the itchy compulsion to have him near.

It’s a feeling he’d usually try to ignore, but—things are a little different today.

Valtteri’s washing the dishes in a basin when he hears shouts and laughing echo off the hillside, and he looks up to watch Daniel chase Clara across the campground and seize the vlogging camera from her, turning it on himself and speaking animatedly, though too far away to be audible.

“Daniel Joseph!” Elli shouts. Valtteri swings his gaze across the clearing to see her sitting on the roof rack of the Skoda, holding a mug of what’s presumably tea. “Leave my wife alone, you brute,” she calls. 

“Okay, _Mom,”_ Daniel yells, first flipping her off then blowing a kiss to the lens.

Probably telling all his fans he’ll be back again soon.

It seems to take forever for everyone to go to bed that night—the rubber ducky SEAT kids have a catastrophe setting up one of their tents, River locks the van keys inside the van and Elli has to jimmy it open, and no one wants to leave the campfire. Valtteri, determined to outlast them, waits quietly, tending to the dying coals while throwing pointed eye contact at Daniel, who sits on the opposite side of the fire in a rare matching silence. Eventually everyone else turns in, scattering to their tents, leaving Valtteri and Daniel under the intimidatingly wide night sky. 

Daniel finally breaks his silence.

“Bedtime?”

“Yeah.”

They douse the fire thoroughly and quietly, running through their night routines without a word until they dive into their tent, and Valtteri zips it closed behind them. It’s faintly stuffy inside the closed space, so he forgoes his bedding to lie on top of it, listening to the restless shifting of Daniel beside him.

His bedmate abruptly sits up and turns his phone flashlight on.

“Jesus, fuck—” Valtteri swears, burying his face in his blanket. “You’re making me blind.”

Shoving his phone under a discarded shirt, the light dims to a softer glow. “Sorry, just— I need to see you right now,” Daniel says, sounding not nearly apologetic enough.

“I’m right here,” Valtteri murmurs, meaning it to be a grumble, but it comes out too soft.

Daniel lies down again, settling himself into his pillow. “You always are.”

“You miss me when I’m not.” Valtteri, lying flat on his back, turns his head to see Daniel watching him. The glow of the light plays off the high points of Daniel’s face and his bare shoulder, throwing a warmth over him. They speak in hushed tones, used to the thinness of tent walls by now. They’re in open air, in the middle of a world that doesn’t know them, but the cocoon of nylon, filled with bedding and _each other,_ has become a more familiar place than either of them could have imagined after the first night in Prague. 

Daniel doesn't have to answer, and Valtteri reaches across the small expanse between them to deliberately lay a hand on his arm. Daniel takes the hint and shifts closer, pushing away his sleeping bag in the August heat. 

“I was thinking a little.”

Valtteri doesn’t respond immediately, just shifts, tucking himself closer. Daniel’s hand drifts over his shoulders.

“You weren’t doing a lot of talking, I guess,” Valtteri finally replies. 

“You, uh—”

“Yeah?”

“You don’t have to do anything. With me. If you don’t want, obviously,” Daniel says almost haltingly. His words bely his actions, though, as he wraps an arm around Valtteri, warm hand burning against his back. 

“Worried I’m too hot for you now?” Valtteri replies drily, pulling away from Daniel to seek eye contact in the shadow. He makes out Daniel blinking concernedly, and moves to continue, but Daniel just presses a warm hand across Valtteri’s mouth to shut him up. 

“No, like, you said before that you don’t—you’re _not looking for anything right now,”_ he quotes, “and I know things are different now, than they were—” and his brow furrows.

The concern in Daniel’s face makes Valtteri’s breaths come a little shallowly, careful to not disturb anything deeper in himself. The wound is still there, Daniel moving into Valtteri’s pain with hands eager to help, but touching just where he doesn’t want to feel anything right now. 

“Things are different but like, you still said that. And I don’t have to understand, VB, but it would be nice to.” Daniel swallows. “I like ‘em vulnerable,” he laughs softly, “but here—” he pokes Valtteri’s chest— “more than anything else.”

 _So silly of Daniel to talk of openness when he lets me read the world in his face._ Valtteri wants to smooth the creases between Daniel’s brows; they say too much. An attack of thoughts that aren’t his own, and it’s more than Valtteri wants to know.

“I’m not worried about that.” Valtteri pries Daniel’s hand from his mouth and curls it in his own fierce grip. “Don’t worry about this,” he insists. “What happens on the Mongol Rally stays on the Mongol Rally, yeah?” His voice is light in his own ears, and it’s a long moment before Daniel replies. 

“Yeah.”

“Don’t worry,” Valtteri repeats, pushing a hand into Daniel’s chest as if he can press the words through his skin, to make them true. 

"I won't," Daniel says breathlessly, letting Valtteri push him onto his back. "Not at all." His hands shift, one curling around the back of Valtteri's neck, the other wrapping warmly around his back as Daniel tugs insistently, until he's splayed half across Daniel's chest. 

Valtteri goes pliant in Daniel's touch, slightly overwhelmed by a familiarity he'd hoped to forget. 

It's not like he's been deprived of all physical touch for the last weeks, but Daniel's hands are _asking_ despite their stillness, and his skin is so warm that a scrap of Valtteri's inhibition melts, and he ducks his chin to meet Daniel with a kiss for the second time.

“I’m not doing anything I don’t want,” he says meaningfully, after pulling away, propping himself up. Underneath him, Daniel’s eyes are wide but his tongue darts out to lick his lips, and Valtteri won’t look away.

“Better than last time, yeah?” Daniel breathes, and his skin is hot where Valtteri runs fingertips down his neck. 

“Not sure I felt it,” Valtteri replies wickedly, but he can feel his smile belying his words. “Might have to try it again?”

Daniel pushes Valtteri onto his back, swallows a laugh, and they try again.

* * *

They don’t talk about it next morning, but they don’t have to. The space in the silences between them holds no echoes. Valtteri doesn’t think about it too much, and if there’s flustered flush in Daniel’s looks, well—that could be anything.

* * *

“Arto’s not going anywhere for a hot minute,” Daniel announces, voice muffled from his position underneath the car. He scrambles out, gravel crunching and dust powdering his clothes. “They need more than just a break, they need—”

“—parts,” Valtteri concludes heavily, hands on his hips. He eyes the little car.

Arto Kämänen even looks sad, resting a little crookedly on the uneven ground, sunken too far forward at the driver side front wheel. They should have spotted that rock—disguised as it was by shrubbery—but in Valtteri’s defense, Daniel was driving. After eating a late lunch at a deceptively idyllic roadside, they’d done a driver switch, and a slightly careless three-point turn to rejoin the road had ended with a sickening lurch and a crunch Valtteri felt in his joints.

“Yikes.” Daniel had shut off the car and sent a woeful look at Valtteri, who had shrugged.

“Yeah. Let’s just get a look at it.” 

After flagging down the others and getting help to push Arto free, Daniel had crawled under the car to find the damage, emerging with his bad news.

“Oh dear, that’s… not ideal,” Elli says ruefully. She tosses Daniel a towel for his greasy hands. “What timeline are we looking at, here?”

Daniel shrugs, and looks to Valtteri. He also shrugs. “Have to get the car to a garage before we can know, obviously. Maybe just a few hours, maybe days?”

“Shit.” Clara wrinkles her nose.

“I mean, might as well get them the sump guard too while we’re in the shop, or next time it’ll be the oil pan that goes and we’ll really be up shit creek without a paddle.”

“I think ‘in the geographic centre of Turkmenistan with an oil leak’ is bad enough,” Valtteri amends tartly. “But yeah, let’s take care of this and get back going.”

Daniel climbs into the Skoda with Elli and Clara along with some of their essentials, as Valtteri works with Team _West Coast Blessed Coast_ to do their dubious best to gingerly tow Arto to the nearest town’s garage. He adds another sticky note to the dash for the inaugural use of their tow rope.

At the local garage, the mechanic also shrugs, but Valtteri joins them in the garage pit to point out the destroyed front shock mount.

“Also this one,” the mechanic notes a minute later, indicating a crack in the same part on the other side of the car. “Soon it will break.”

Valtteri winces. “Can you secure it now, too?”

“Both of them, I can change,” they offer nonchalantly. “Your shocks too new, too tight.”

Valtteri has an unwilling flashback to Kimi’s garage and his suggestion they update the suspension, which they obviously did, deferring at the time to the informally proclaimed Lada expert. He grits his teeth. "How long to repair that, then?"

"Two days? Today starting is too late, tomorrow to fix mounts, then a guard—" they gesture broadly at the underside of the engine.

"The sump guard. I guess you have to make that?"

"Yeah, and put it in then. So, day after tomorrow."

Valtteri climbs out of the garage pit and finds the others taking a water break in the yard. “Two days,” he calls, raising that many fingers in a V that means anything but victory. His footsteps crunch in the gravel and he grabs the bottle from Daniel’s hand to take a gulp before speaking again. It’s goddamned hot, and his mouth is dry from the dust. “Starting tomorrow,” he adds.

Elli and Clara glance at each other. “The rest of us have to be _at_ Gürbulak in two days to meet our guide through Iran,” Elli says unhappily. 

“You were going to drive straight through to the border?”

“Yeah, just at the usual pace. I know we were going to have to say bye tomorrow night anyway, but it was going to be _nice,_ and planned, and not…” she shrugs. While _The Pitiful of Motorsport_ had planned a route through the Caucasus and across the Caspian Sea, the others in their convoy are traveling the southern route overland through Iran to Turkmenistan. The plan was to split the next evening as Valtteri and Daniel turned north toward Georgia. 

“Well—” Daniel checks his wrist for a watch, finds none, then glances at Valtteri’s silently proffered wrist. “It’s already too late to keep going today, right?” he asks hopefully.

The other teams reach a murmured agreement, deferring to Clara, who spreads open a map across the hood of the Skoda. “Sounds fine, we’ll make up ground tomorrow, alright? That’s peachy with everyone?” 

“So—camp here one night, you’ll go in the morning, Dan and I hang out here until Arto’s ready,” Valtteri calculates.

“Just one night longer until they free my boy,” Daniel says cheerfully.

Valtteri clears his throat. 

“Free my non-binary progeny,” Daniel amends. 

“That’s better.”

They ask the mechanic for recommendations on where to set up camp, and receive directions to an open field on the outskirts of the town, as well as a warm invitation to stay for a meal. The evening passes easily, and Valtteri can’t help but be glad this isn’t the final parting from their travel companions. 

After setting up camp and while Daniel’s messily constructing the campfire, with hindrance from Grayson and Henry, Clara turns the camera on Valtteri for the first time, after the courtesy so far to leave him out of the vlogs. 

“Say hello and goodbye, V,” she instructs cheerily from behind the lens.

Sprawled bonelessly in his camping chair, he raises his hand in a wave that turns into a peace sign, and Clara moves to join him on the lens side of the camera. 

“Danny boy and V here’ve had the honours of the first garage visit,” she chatters as the recording light blinks, “so their lovely little Lada won’t be joining us for a while. The boys will be heading north after their car’s back, but if all goes to plan we’ll be seeing them again in Ashgabat!”

“But nothing goes to plan,” Valtteri grins, “so we’ll be running on luck.”

“And Red Bull,” she says. “Shout out your sponsors, mate.”

“Oh, well in that case—” he puts on his sunglasses and crosses his arms, bringing his cheap wristwatch into the frame. “Feels familiar,” he says darkly, and it’s tempting fate but it does feel like a transformation.

She laughs. “Anyway, how’s Turkey treated you? Can we run a quick debrief?”

He perches his sunglasses back on his cap and cocks his head at the camera. Somehow, this feels less awkward than he’d supposed. “It’s my first time traveling through the country, obviously, but it’s been a lot of fun. The food is great, it’s so good to see, uh, so many friendly people and be able to meet them. We didn’t push, just drove a really easy trip to enjoy the scenery. We’ve got a strong team here, everyone’s working together and watching each other’s backs, and we’ll see what the next country brings.” Thumbs up. He turns to Clara. “We’ll see what Turkmenistan brings, I mean.”

She slings an arm around his shoulders. “And there you’ve heard it! A gorgeous country, as I’m sure you’ve all seen so far—can’t wait to show you guys the edited footage.” Clara winks at the camera and ends the recording. Fidgeting with the camera strap, she confides, “Dude, your interview personality is almost freaky. No offense.”

“I’m not taking any,” Valtteri says, honestly. “You can edit it out, I won’t even know.”

“If you want, I can let you know what I’m putting in the final cut, so you can veto anything if it’s not a good idea.”

He shrugs. “It’s okay, really, Dan and I know how to watch our mouths. What’s Toto going to do anyway, drive to the middle of Kazakhstan and fire me again?”

She laughs at this, and then Valtteri does too, and he realises that it didn’t hurt _too_ much to say that at all. But then Clara gives him a hug, hard and unexpected, and he tries to forget the ache completely. 

“It’s less than two weeks until we’ll see you again,” he reminds her, before she pulls away and pats him on the back.

“Take care of Danny, okay, V? We want you to get there all in one piece.”

“He’ll take care of me, too.”

* * *

Two mornings later, after everyone’s gone, the silence is noticeable. When Valtteri wakes up, the solitary clattering outside the tent is only Daniel making coffee for two. The tacit agreement to silence is only broken by a mumbled _good morning_ from Valtteri, which Daniel responds to with a one-armed hug. They lean into each other for a moment. 

“Sad times all around,” Daniel says, buckling his seatbelt once they’ve packed the car and climbed in. He starts the engine and shifts in his seat, looking over at Valtteri. “Back to just the two old fucks again?”

“Three, don’t forget Arto, the oldest fuck of them all,” Valtteri adds serenely. 

“Good old Arto-D2. Back and better than ever.” He thumps the door panel. “You gonna take us back to Baku, babe?”

“I’m _trying,”_ Valtteri says, pulling numbered papers from his folder.

“Not you. The car.”

Valtteri aggressively rattles the map of Georgia in Daniel’s direction. “The car’s not gonna suck your dick.”

“And you are?” Daniel leers.

“Mm.” He bites down on a smile. “Didn’t say anything.”

“Sure you didn’t.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [VB’s TRAVEL LOG]  
> \- clara stole my fav mug. so disrespected  
> \- rainy weather forcast for georgia. check + secure roofracks  
> \- [there’s a loose polaroid of valtteri and daniel sitting shoulder-to-shoulder on the hood of arto kämänen. the photo is taken from behind them, with a pink sky ahead.]


	7. pony up

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Due to the content of this chapter and ones to come, I'm upping the rating of this fic from M to E. This is the official warning. (first nut in the longfic... isn't that like first blood in a conflict)
> 
> this chapter only took a whole uni semester to get out, and I'm sorry for that. (I didn't write much! but I did write an AU heavily featuring daniel & valtteri as buddies, so if you want some friendship dantteri, check it out in my profile—) I've been rethinking the writing process, will probably test some habits, and updates should be more existent from hereon out. thanks to everyone who hung around for five months. I love you and we go again <3

[DR3 + VB77’s Mongol Rally ‘22 Album]

[there’s a photo of daniel driving, taken in profile from the passenger’s seat. the photographer is proffering an unwrapped granola bar to daniel, who’s making a face. below, a blurry photo out the windshield of a towering cloud formation. the other page is covered by a glued-in reservation confirmation on crumpled printer paper. it’s water-stained beyond readability, with the words “fuck you!” scribbled in valtteri’s handwriting below. beside this note, in daniel’s handwriting, are the words “yes please :)”]

* * *

The rain hits the next day, as Valtteri and Daniel cross the border into Georgia. As if to make up for all the good weather so far, black clouds blanket the sky, hovering low, and Valtteri even has to switch on the headlights in the thicker parts of the roadside forests. Arto crawls along the new territory reluctantly as the clouds break, the rainshower washing the dust from the car like a baptism approved with a visa stamp.

The scent of hot pavement soaked in summer rain hits Valtteri like a wave, but as the shower turns into a downpour, he’s forced to roll up the windows to watch wide-eyed as the sky cracks open. 

Daniel, despite not driving, is antsy. “I dunno, man,” he says suddenly. He shuts off the radio.

Valtteri looks over at him from the driver’s seat. “That bad, huh?”

Daniel gestures at the windshield, beginning to fog up as the air outside cools. “You seeing any better than I am right now?”

“We’ll slow down,” Valtteri compromises. He passes Daniel a towel to make a few passes over the inside of the windshield, but it barely helps. They drive in silence as the downpour worsens, splashing through giant puddles on the poorly drained roads.

“Maybe we should pull over and take a break,” Daniel says, breaking a long silence. “Until it stops, or slows. I don’t know if we should be driving in this.”

Valtteri only keeps squinting at the road ahead, and mutters something about the sorely inadequate windshield wipers. “We’ve got to be close, it’s only going to get darker if we wait,” he says eventually. 

The road map is limp in Daniel’s hands, creased where he’s already struggled with it. “I hope we’re close. I’m not sure—I hope I’ve got us on the right road.”

“Check the notes on the other sheet for the campsite address," says Valtteri, pointing with a jerk of his head.

There are a few damning flips of the paper until Daniel speaks. “Okay, yeah, we’re definitely not on the right road,” he clarifies hesitantly. 

Valtteri grits his teeth. “Maybe you should drive while I’ll do nav,” he suggests, too much annoyance seeping into his voice.

“You wanna get out and switch now?” The rhetorical question doesn’t deserve as much bite as Daniel puts into it—neither of them want to get drenched on top of being lost. 

“No, fuck, just… find a way back,” Valtteri says, slowing on the empty roadway but not stopping. “Hope this stops soon, pretty terrible weather to camp in anyway.”

They turn around and Daniel hesitantly sets their course down a side road, once again proving to be wrong before Valtteri pulls over and grabs the map from his hands. Daniel shuts up, evidently catching the look in his teammate’s eye, even through the thick grey light which is all they have to see by. It takes another half hour of driving in the darkness—and a softening silence—before the headlights catch on a roadside sign painted on peeling plywood, and no one in the car can read Georgian but the lettering is just familiar enough. 

He pulls the wheel and they splash through the roadside puddle and down a narrow, brush-lined laneway before Arto’s low beams sweep over ramshackle facilities, an orange sodium lamp casting a feeble glow around one outbuilding approached by a narrow dirt road. More of a path than a road, to be honest. 

“Who the hell booked this?” Valtteri demands, knowing full well he did himself. He should have known not to trust the dodgy mobile website run through Google Translate from Georgian into English, nor to trust the unreliable language software with his booking request. 

“Certainly looks budget,” Daniel comments, moving to peer through an un-foggy patch of windshield. “Jeepers. I miss every single hotel I ever stayed in right now.”

“We can’t go anywhere else,” Valtteri says, exasperated. “It’s too dark already for driving on these roads. Besides, I’m too tired.”

The car scrapes along one final bush before they pull to a stop in the middle of a tiny clearing, and Valtteri slumps in his seat. Daniel pulls out his phone, and Valtteri hasn’t the energy to tell him that’s cheating, nor does he care right now. “Yeah, nah, this matches the photos online.”

“Is this it, then?” 

“I don’t think anyone’s coming out to kick us out if it isn’t.” The light on Daniel’s face dies as he puts his phone away, and Valtteri bangs a hand against the steering wheel.

“Fuck,” he swears, but it’s all mournful with no bite. “Let’s see how bad it is.” He cracks open the door and jumps out, only just holding back a yelp.  _ “Shit.” _ Slamming the door on Daniel’s questioning, he’s up to his ankles in muddy water, more rain pouring from the sky by the second. Within five seconds his shirt’s soaked through, but with unsure footing he makes his way around the car, searching in vain for spot without flooding. He opens the trunk to grab a flashlight but something bulky tumbles out and hits the water with a splash, and— _ shit, _ that’s his duffel bag.

_ Who the hell packed the car last? _

Disgusted, he bundles it back in, dripping wet, and slams the back hatch. His shoes are soaked, so are all his clothes, their campsite is non-fucking-existent in the storm, and he doesn’t want to drive a metre further.

He climbs back into the car. 

“It’s bad?” asks Daniel innocently. He reaches into the backseat for the flashlight lantern—shit, that’s where it was—and turns it on.

Valtteri squints into the blue light. “It’s a fucking flood,” he glowers.

“You look drowned," Daniel says. Valtteri ignores him. 

He starts the car again.

“Where are we going now?”

“Five metres over there to park and go to sleep in here,” Valtteri says decisively, pointing across the clearing as the car begins to creep along. “I just don’t want to be parked in the middle here.”

“Should we be under the trees if there’s a storm?”

“I don’t think it’s a storm, it’s been hours and no thunder or lightning, and karma’s done enough to me today, so if we’re hit by a tree it’ll only crush you.” He kills the engine and the headlights die, and they’re cast into darkness again. Rain drums on the roof of the car.

They’re silent for a moment.

“I hate this,” Valtteri bursts out. 

“You’ll feel better when you’re dried off,” Daniel says, twisting around in his seat to rummage through the backseat for Valtteri’s bag.

He shakes his head, futilely wiping wet hands on wetter clothes. “My bag’s in the back, and it’s soaking. It fell out.”

Daniel only reaches into the back seat again, grabbing his own backpack. He drags the zipper open, digs through it and pulls out some clothes, tossing them at Valtteri. They land on his lap, and he makes no move until Daniel prompts, “Just wear those for now. You can clean up tomorrow.”

“This shirt, you wore it yesterday.”

“So?”

“It smells like you.”

“Is that a problem?”

“Obviously,” Valtteri huffs, but he takes off his cap and tosses it onto the dash. Underneath it, at least his hair is only damp.

“It’s either smelling like Daniel Ricciardo or soaking wet all night, man.” He pauses. “Not the first time I’m the reason someone’s been soaking wet all night, though.”

Valtteri doesn’t dignify that with a response, just shakes out the t-shirt and sweatpants and looks at them balefully.

“You gonna change or not?”

“Not if you’re fucking looking at me,” Valtteri says, with less contempt than he intended.

“Two steps forward, three steps back.” Daniel grunts. “Most people would take having their tongue down someone’s throat as a progression, but we’re special.”

“I sure am,” Valtteri says, voice muffled as he pulls his wet shirt off over his head. 

“Nude shoulders. Exactly what turns me on,” Daniel commentates, kicking off his own shoes and slouching into the car seat. He’s watching, Valtteri knows he is.

“You’ve been seeing my dick since we had been 18, you’re more progressed than you think,” Valtteri deadpans. “No need to uh—scrutinise.”

“If I was interested in looking at your dick in F3, I can still be interested now,” Daniel replies, pulling his hoodie tighter around himself and settling comfortably against the car door. 

“You’re talking out of your ass and you know it,” Valtteri decides. He puts on the dry shirt, and the space is cramped but he manages to strip out of his rain-wet shorts and put on the sweatpants Daniel produced. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees his own reflection in the window glass, lit by the lantern Daniel’s moved to the dashboard. “I look like a wet rat,” he says contentedly, but runs a hand through his hair self-consciously anyway. 

“Can I not be serious?”

“Get your dick out then,” Valtteri replies without thinking, freezing fractionally as he realises what he just said, then blinking it off.

Daniel appears to consider this, then frowns. “I’m not going to jerk off  _ alone _ in front of you.”

“That would be impolite,” Valtteri agrees. “That’s not good teammate behaviour.”

“Unless you’re into that,” Daniel adds. He looks at Valtteri, unmoving.

Valtteri’s silent.

Daniel’s silent. 

“I’m not,” Valtteri says. “Sounds like a waste of time to me.” He fidgets with the hem of his shirt, Daniel’s shirt, soft and too-big on his body again. He looks up, meets Daniel’s eyes. 

“That would be kind of selfish,” Daniel adds. He’s commentating for the sake of something to say, his voice mild but his look intense. 

Valtteri shrugs weakly, doesn’t break their gaze. “If you like the wet rat look.”

“I like the VB look. Even without the beard.” He leans over a little, and unconsciously, Valtteri does too. Daniel reaches out slowly and touches his cheek, and at the contact, Valtteri jumps back.

He leans back in his seat and squeezes his eyes shut. “Fine,” he says through gritted teeth. He reaches forward and snaps the light off.  _ “We’ll _ get our dicks out.”

“VB—”

“Don’t touch me,” Valtteri says softly, firmly, then laughs without tone. “I know you’re lying if you try saying you never have done something worse in a car than have a wank.”

Daniel almost giggles. “Point to you.”

“We’ve literally done this before—”

“Two-thousand-and-fucking-eight,” Daniel retorts. “With  _ JEV. _ And—”

“I don’t need a name list,” Valtteri says, voice muffled again as he pulls on a sweatshirt. “I was there.” It’s Daniel’s sweater. An old merch piece. The line-art of a rose-tattooed hand lies heavily on his chest, and he feels it with every breath he takes. “Just—” he glances over at Daniel, against his better judgement, and even in the darkness he knows he’s looking back. Just enough light filters from the outbuilding through the surrounding trees to outline the shape of Daniel’s face.

“Yeah?”

Valtteri can hear him swallow, but the drumming of rain on the car erases any rustling of clothes he imagines he hears. At least, he pretends he just imagined them. He nods.

“Just don’t make this weird.”

Daniel laughs shortly, then sighs. “Long past that with you, man.”

“Shh.”

Valtteri squeezes his eyes shut and tries to blank his mind as, against all good judgement, he shoves his hand under the waistband of his sweatpants.  _ Daniel's sweatpants, _ his brain helpfully reminds him, and if he grins at that, at least Daniel never knows.

He's half hard already, but he can’t bother embarrassment over that now when they both know he’s got the upper hand. There’s nothing about this situation that’s free of its own hilarity anyway—two bros, wanking in a Lada, one foot apart because there’s a fucking thunderstorm outside.

It's just a wank, right? He can jerk off, go to sleep, and feel better for it in the morning. That is, if Daniel doesn't make it fucking weird. Which he might. Which he probably will. Which they’re long past.

He's silent, in the other seat of the car, and Valtteri doesn't look over. From the corner of his eye he catches faintly illuminated movement, and tries to think about anything but Daniel. Tries to. Fails miserably. Daniel shifts, and Valtteri turns his head away. 

He squeezes his eyes shut and thinks of Daniel's hand, wrapped around his own cock. It’s easier to think about that than about his own hand, easier to think about Daniel thinking about him, and Valtteri almost laughs before catching himself. He can’t be the one to break the silence. 

Valtteri tips his head back, spreading his thighs as he instinctively palms his own dick without thought. He barely pays mind to the way he’s hardening under his own touch, as his brain grasps for some thought to latch on to, to ground himself before he thinks himself out of his own head. His thoughts snag on the stir of Daniel’s movement beside him, and Valtteri swallows hard. This would almost be less weird if their hands were on each other, too busy pouring out attention to fixate even momentarily on the mental game at hand. It’s not like that would be new, anyway—Valtteri thinks of a night in Daniel’s bed. Emotion to drown in each other: if not sorrow, then at least disorientation. 

Disorientation. The headspace which can make a man feel as lost in Monaco’s two square kilometres as he does on a roadtrip over 17,000 klicks. The only thing in Monaco that Valtteri wants to return to is Daniel’s bed. 

But he can’t say he wants to move forward, either. 

Beside him, Daniel’s breaths come short and fast, and Valtteri can’t help blinking his eyes open. He can’t look over—he can’t, that would break every rule in the book. Even though it’s a book both of them must be terrified to write, paralysed by the possibility of  _ legitimacy. _ No, everything goes smoothly when he keeps his head turned away, but the sound of Daniel working his own dick is too present to block out, the rustling of well-washed fabrics and the panting he’s obviously trying to hide, each breath catching in his throat. 

“If you’re going to start moaning, please get it over with,” Valtteri says, terse, but he tries to ignore the twist of heat that Daniel’s breathing sends through him. He wouldn’t have said he’s close but—but now he might be. It’s been a few days since the last, anyway. Camping doesn’t lend itself well to either privacy nor sanitation.

“Shut the fuck up,” Daniel rasps, and chastised, Valtteri does. 

He shifts in his seat to break the tension in his body, shoves uselessly at the waistband of his sweatpants to create a semblance of comfort. This is so crude, physically and interpersonally, but Daniel’s no tasteful angel himself, so Valtteri focuses past the obscenity and readjusts his grip on his cock to stroke himself firmly, his fingers already sticky with precum. He’ll worry about that later. 

But he’s already poked a hole in the glass wall between them, and as he lets his head turn to watch Daniel, only to find Daniel’s eyes already on him, the remnants of that projected barrier shatter entirely. 

“Cheater,” he whispers, but doesn’t follow with a laugh. 

Daniel grins weakly and closes his eyes. “It’s only cheating if you touch, isn’t that the rule?”

Valtteri doesn’t answer, just thinks about the last time he  _ touched, _ all hot hands and muted laughs in their stuffy camping tent, and Daniel’s precise little bites along bare shoulders. Everything staying above the waist, but he’d be a fool to pretend neither of them had thought of more. He thinks of curling his fingers through Daniel’s hair and pulling his head back, the way that Daniel whined the last time Valtteri tried that, the way he’d beg for it again. 

He's willing to admit he's missed that bed in Monaco more than he thought. 

Maybe he missed that convenient, harmless version of Monaco Daniel, and the easy fantasy it had been to think about fucking off from reality and driving halfway around the world. Shrouding himself from version 1.0 of his grief by allowing himself to buy into Daniel’s daydream, as if that would lead him to some sort of home. He hadn’t lost enough yet to get slapped back to his senses. 

Yeah, that had been a pretty far cry from where he is right now.

That  _ dumbass. _ Daniel’s shit at nav, and this is where they both pay for it. Shit at nav, but good in bed. Valtteri bites his lip, suddenly hit with the unbidden and unhinged little fantasy of making Daniel  _ pay for it. _ Maybe he’d been too quick to suggest a wank instead of extracting some justice, and he almost laughs at the thought. There’s no harm in indulging the horny little revenge daydream though, and it’s almost damning how his dick twitches at the thought of getting Daniel underneath him again. 

Heaven alone could shut Daniel up but Valtteri knows he'd like to try, knows Daniel would open up easily for fingers fucked into his mouth just as easily as he spreads his thighs to fit Valtteri between them. He's reactive and that's what makes it fun, fighting him back down into the mattress and clamping a hand over his mouth when he starts whining.

Valtteri is pretty sure he lets out a gasp at the thought.

The tussle between them has always gone both ways—albeit more muted in one direction than the other—and Valtteri can't imagine it would be any different during sex. They've spent their whole careers as sadomasochists willingly engaging in the depraved act of live broadcasted competition, procedurally ripping out each other's throats for a chance at a flush of glory, at the direct expense of another's public shaming. Getting a hand around Daniel's throat in bed is far, far more merciful than standing on a podium step above him.

Valtteri comes before he prepares for the logistics of the mess, releasing a shuddering breath before realising there’s jizz all over his own hand. 

It's pretty disgusting, actually.

“Fuck,” he says, the exhale turning into a laugh. He sighs. “Fuck.”

“Shut up,” Daniel grunts, and Valtteri turns away, really not wanting to bear witness to what’s coming next. No pun intended, he tells himself, and watches the rain run down the window glass. 

Daniel comes with an obscene whine, and a few rasping breaths later, also giggles. _ “Fuck.” _

“I really don’t want to hear it,” Valtteri says, grim, dreading the clean-up. “You have tissues?”

“Nope,” Daniel announces, digging around indiscriminately into the backseat with his free hand, the other still shoved in his pants. He comes back with a towel, holding it up for a momentary consideration too short for Valtteri to protest.

“That’s my towel,” he complains, too late. 

“You literally nut in my pants, don’t complain about a towel,” Daniel says, distracted with his personal clean-up.

Valtteri winces, then shies away as Daniel moves to hand the towel to him. “Jesus. I’m not touching that until you wash it,” he says, but wipes the worst of the mess from his hands onto the crumpled cloth. Daniel switches the flashlight lantern back on and turns to Valtteri, who looks him straight in the eye and wipes the rest of the now-cold, gluey spunk onto his—Daniel’s—hoodie. “We’ll call that fair now,” he deadpans. “You’re fucking gross.”

“We’re fucking gross,” Daniel corrects him, but digs in the glove compartment for hand sanitiser, and tosses it over. 

“Thanks. I feel surely loved now.”

Daniel stretches, as best he can in the cramped seat, and yawns, before pulling his hood up and curling up against the car door. “You know what, VB?”

“What?” he asks, mirroring Daniel’s actions but facing him across the centre console. He shivers, cold where his shoulders press against the window. If he curls up tight, he can hug his knees to his chest and tuck himself in the corner created by seat and door, resting his head on the seat. Daniel’s height is a handicap here, but he looks like he’s making it work. It’s hardly the best overnight accommodation they’ve shared. Neither of them turn the light off, and he catches Daniel’s tired, aimless gaze with his own. 

“You’re a coward, and a fool,” Daniel says, with no vitriol. 

Valtteri hums. “Maybe I am.” He pulls up his own hood, and settles again. “Maybe we both are.”

“‘t’s not about me,” Daniel shrugs. “I know me, but you don’t know you. You don’t know what the fuck you’re doing.”

Valtteri speaks softly, but doesn’t take his eyes from Daniel. “Maybe I just don’t care.”

The words hang.

“You’re also a liar, or you really have no idea what’s going on.” 

“Now’s not the time, you know,” Valtteri says, and he knows his exasperation and exhaustion are leaking into his voice, but the energy to control that is long gone. “Bare your soul when I want to look at it.” He stuffs his face into his crossed arms. 

“That’s not how this works,” Daniel argues, and Valtteri doesn’t move. 

Daniel walks around Valtteri all the fucking time with no shields up, but he doesn’t know that shields are just as much for protecting others from him as himself from others. And this isn’t about F1-Daniel, this isn’t about the designer shades and the designer teeth that reflect photography flashes right back at the ones who will can and sell the façade of a personality.

“That’s not how it works for  _ you,” _ Valtteri finally mumbles.

This goes right back to two-thousand-and-fucking-eight, when Daniel was a boy with no pretensions. And it runs up until right now, 2022, where Daniel’s a man pretending he never used pretentions and that commodified personality as a crowbar in the gates of heaven, to deify himself in a sport he never actually ruled. But the peculiarity, the red flag, is that Daniel’s shields never went up around Valtteri.

And maybe he’s stupid to resent that, but— 

Sometimes you can’t argue with your own brain. 

He doesn’t know what called for the differentiation, but he does know it’s rankled him. It’s almost a sly dig, that Daniel’s willing to be so loose with his image. As if he feels he can afford to keep that wide-eyed, pure-hearted spirit of 2008, but only around this guy who’s been within arm’s reach the whole time. As if Valtteri was never a threat.

It’s definitely insulting to not even feel like a factor. And then, after over a decade of whatever-that-was, to cap it all off with the buddy summer road trip from hell. It’s an impressive, enraging masterpiece of a mind game to play on a man who’s never even entered the arena, and Valtteri feels sick. 

“I wish I knew what you’re doing,” he says finally, before he realises Daniel never replied. 

Daniel scoffs, but it’s lighthearted. “You know I feel the exact same way, right?” He pauses, leans over and grabs Valtteri’s ankle, dragging his leg across the centre console to rest his socked foot in Daniel’s lap. Valtteri looks up, doesn’t say anything. Daniel squeezes Valtteri’s ankle and doesn’t move his hand. “What the hell was that, VB?”

Valtteri snorts a laugh, but doesn’t pull his limb back. “A well-deserved break.  _ You _ sounded like you needed it, anyway.”

“There’s no way for me to say ‘I’ll help next time’ without sounding like I’m hitting on you,” Daniel says, “which isn’t anything I’ve got reservations about, but—you know. I’m aiming for something a little more wholesome here.”

The blue light of the lantern isn’t kind to Daniel’s face, tipping harsh shadows across the angles and planes. He looks exhausted, well-worn, like he’s going to return to Monaco with a different face than the one he left with. The notion is warmth in Valtteri’s chest. 

“Make this easy for me, okay?” Daniel insists. “I can’t do anything to you that you don’t want for yourself, you stubborn son of a bitch—”

Valtteri grins.

“—but you’ve got to pony up on these heart-to-hearts.” 

Valtteri looks at Daniel flatly. “You’ve got to get to sleep.”

“Tell me you love me and we’ll figure it out tomorrow.”

“No.”

“Tell me  _ something,” _ Daniel cajoles, shaking Valtteri’s leg like—like it’s some cat toy.

He still doesn’t pull it back. “If you’re fucking with me, I’ll kick you out of the car.”

Daniel grins, relaxing into the soft folds of his sweater again. “I’m not.” He licks his lips. “I’m not sure I’d know how if I wanted to.”

Valtteri squints at him. “You’re not a good man to believe.”

Reaching to the dashboard, Daniel switches off the lantern. “Beddy-byes, VB. I love you and we’ll figure it out tomorrow.”

_ “Don’t.” _

“Sleep tight.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [VB’s TRAVEL LOG]  
> \- call home when we reach baku  
> \- buy tarp for roof rack


End file.
